If what gripped you was Frank’s transgressive opening of Lemarchand’s box—and the way that single indulgence summons the Cenobites’ cold theology of pain and pleasure—then you’ll relish how The Ceremonies turns arcane scholarship and secret rites into a doorway for something ancient and merciless. Like Kirsty’s bargaining and misdirection, characters here try to outmaneuver powers they barely understand, only to discover the ritual has them in its grip.

If you were drawn to the close-quarters dread of Julia luring men into that banal domestic space so Frank can feed—a hell opening inside a house—Mexican Gothic traps you in High Place, where rot, desire, and a predatory family history press inward. As Kirsty does in the boardinghouse stairwells, Noemí stalks tight corridors and confronts a secret that reshapes bodies and minds from the inside out.

If Frank’s relentless hunger for sensation—and Kirsty’s dawning realization of the cost—hooked you, The Fisherman channels that same escalating obsession. Grief lures men to a cursed river the way the puzzle box lures seekers to the Cenobites; stories within stories peel back a vast, pitiless cosmology, and by the time the truth surfaces, escape requires a bargain as perilous as Kirsty’s.

If the hooks, chains, and flayed ecstasies of the Cenobites—and Julia’s blood-slick offerings to reconstitute Frank—were part of the appeal, Exquisite Corpse delivers cruelty up close. Though not supernatural, its eroticized violence and fixation on the body evoke the same queasy intensity Barker brings to Frank’s regeneration in that attic, pushing the boundary between revulsion and dark allure.

If you appreciated how Julia becomes a willing accomplice—and how even Kirsty’s heroism involves weaponizing the box to sic the Cenobites on Frank—LaValle’s Tom Tester walks that same knife’s edge. He bargains with cosmic powers and ruthless men, choosing paths as morally shadowed as any in The Hellbound Heart, where survival and vengeance blur the line between victim and villain.