If the vertiginous carnival of reality you loved in Songs of a Dead Dreamer—from the puppet-master dread of “Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech” to the masked, ritualized cityscape of “The Greater Festival of Masks”—is your sweet spot, you’ll thrill (and blanch) at the cursed play threading through The King in Yellow. Chambers’ tales don’t explain so much as whisper from behind a torn backdrop, letting stage-sets peel away to reveal an alien script that contaminates anyone who reads it. You’ll get that same sensation of a world slightly tilted off its axle, where a page, a party, or a play can open into abyssal pageantry.

If what hooked you was the cold philosophical chill—the way “The Frolic” turns a family tragedy into a glimpse of something inhuman, and “Notes on the Writing of Horror” folds craft into cosmic futility—then The Red Tree will feel like a descent you can’t (and don’t want to) stop. Kiernan’s narrator holes up with a manuscript and a tree that may be a portal, a symbol, or a joke the universe is telling. Like Ligotti, Kiernan blurs diary, scholarship, and hallucination into a sustained argument that meaning is a trap and curiosity a blade—only here you’re the one holding it to your own throat.

If the baroque sentences and perfumed decay of “Les Fleurs” delighted you, Smith’s The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies is a treasure-house of jeweled ruin. His diction glitters even as it describes charnel vaults, sorcerous vendettas, and kingdoms sliding into oblivion. You’ll recognize the pleasure of language that luxuriates in corruption—the same aesthetic intoxication Ligotti uses to make horror feel ceremonial—here elevated into lush, intoxicating spells that make annihilation sound almost desirable.

If you prized the compact, trapdoor structure of stories like “The Chymist”—where a confession becomes a corridor and every corridor ends in a locked room—Aickman’s Cold Hand in Mine perfects that gently inexorable slide into the inexplicable. Each “strange story” closes just as the larger shape of the nightmare comes into view, leaving you with the same lingering aftertaste Ligotti favors: dread without disclosure, implication over explanation.

If the skin-crawling interiority drew you in—the way “The Chymist” lets you inhabit a predator’s logic, or how “The Frolic” turns a home into an existential trap—Evenson’s A Collapse of Horses is a clinic in controlled derangement. His narrators miscount rooms, mistrust their own bodies, and misconstrue mercy; you’ll feel that same tightening loop of thought where reality narrows to a single, terrible conclusion and the page itself starts to lie to you.