If the way the mushroom-grown women rise from the graves and the men endure uncanny bodily changes in The Beauty hooked you, you’ll love the Biologist’s descent into Area X in Annihilation. Its living "tower" (or tunnel), spore-soaked writings on the wall, and shifting landscapes echo that same eerie, organic strangeness—and the narrative’s hypnotic mood mirrors how Nate’s stories blur the line between myth and reality.

You followed Nate’s campfire tales as they quietly reshaped what the men believed about the Valley and the Beauty. In Piranesi, you’ll inhabit another intimate, possibly misleading mind: a diarist wandering endless halls of statues and tides, slowly realizing his world isn’t what he thinks. That same delicate unraveling of truth—felt through one haunting voice—lands with the hush and wonder you enjoyed.

If the close-knit circle of men by the fire, the graveyard, and Nate’s intimate, bodily encounters with the Beauty drew you in, The Ocean at the End of the Lane offers a similarly close-focus strange tale. One narrator recalls a childhood episode where a quiet country lane and a duck pond open into something vast and menacing. It’s the same intimate hush—ordinary places becoming portals to the unsettling—that made The Beauty so potent.

In The Beauty, the world has ended and what rises in its place—those grave-grown companions, the spore-laced metamorphoses—feels both terrifying and inevitable. The Girl With All the Gifts taps the same pulse: a fungal pandemic, a fragile band of survivors, and a child whose very existence forces a reckoning with what humanity becomes next. If you were compelled by Nate’s shifting loyalties and the camp’s collapse, you’ll be riveted here.

If you read the Beauty’s arrival as a charged fable—where desire, fear, and storytelling rewire the men’s bodies and their hierarchy—The Water Cure carries that same symbolic voltage. Three sisters on a secluded coast undergo ritual “cures” against a toxic male world; when strangers intrude, their closed system warps. Like Nate’s tales shaping fate in the Valley, belief and myth act on flesh here, turning metaphor into menace.