If pondering the unexplained moments in The Chronicles of Harris Burdick—like the house blasting off in “The House on Maple Street” or the ominous aftermath of “Mr. Linden’s Library”—was your favorite part, you’ll love Tan’s bite-sized tales. Stories like “Eric,” “The Water Buffalo,” and “Stick Figures” pair uncanny art with just-enough text, handing you the same delicious mystery that those Burdick captions do: you get the clues, you supply the meaning.

If flipping through Burdick’s drawings and spinning narratives from a single image thrilled you, Selznick’s hybrid novel will scratch that itch. Entire sequences—like Hugo racing through the station or the automaton’s sketch revealing Georges Méliès’s secret—unspool wordlessly, just as your mind leapt from the Burdick image of the levitating chair in “The Seven Chairs” to its unstated story. It’s that same picture-first storytelling magic, made into a full mystery.

If the darker Burdick pieces—say, the creeping vines aftermath of “Mr. Linden’s Library” or the unsettling glow around “Archie Smith, Boy Wonder”—were your favorites, Burton’s morbid little fables will feel like home. Characters like Stain Boy and Robot Boy live in sharp, ironic sketches where a single haunting image sets the tone and a twist of fate delivers the punch—just the way those Burdick captions whisper a story you can’t stop finishing in your head.

If the framing mystery of Harris Burdick—an artist who vanishes, leaving only captions and pictures—hooked you, you’ll revel in Bastian discovering a book that begins to read him back. As Atreyu battles the Nothing and the Childlike Empress waits for a name, the act of reading alters the world, echoing how Burdick’s images (like the cathedral-hopping seat in “The Seven Chairs”) force you to step inside and become part of the tale.

If decoding Burdick’s tantalizing hints—linking a caption to a single surreal image, then bracing for a reveal—was your favorite exercise, you’ll love Turtle Wexler piecing through Sam Westing’s will. From the timed bombs to the shifting identities twist, every clue pivots the story the way a Burdick prompt (“The Harp,” “Uninvited Guests”) pivots your expectations—until the final solution snaps everything into focus.