If the grotesque, dreamlike pull of Uncle Philip’s toyshop—especially that nightmarish swan‑puppet performance that turns Melanie’s world uncanny—hooked you, you’ll sink right into the delirium of Fever Dream. Told as a breathless conversation between a sick woman and a strange child, it traps you in a domestic setting where reality keeps tilting, much like Melanie’s nights among puppets and strings. The way Carter makes control feel like witchcraft—Philip’s invisible strings—finds an eerie echo in the book’s ominous “rescue distance,” as maternal instinct and menace blur into a waking nightmare.

If watching Melanie stumble from innocence into awareness—exiled to South London, policed by Uncle Philip’s rules, and forced onto that swan‑lit stage until the final inferno—moved you, Jane Eyre delivers a similarly bracing rite of passage. Jane grows from a silenced girl at Gateshead and Lowood to a fiercely self‑willed woman at Thornfield. The oppressive house, the secretive master, and the purifying blaze feel like spiritual cousins to Melanie’s struggle toward autonomy amid Philip’s suffocating “theater” of power.

If the swan performance’s violent symbolism—and those puppets as emblems of how Philip manipulates Melanie, Finn, and even mute Aunt Margaret—spoke to you, Lolly Willowes turns that feeling into a sly, liberating allegory. Lolly, long contained by dutiful family life, slips into the countryside and embraces witchcraft not as wickedness but emancipation. Where The Magic Toyshop shows the cost of being made a marionette, Lolly’s pact with the Devil becomes a refusal of the strings altogether.

If you were gripped by Melanie’s inner negotiation with fear and desire—her wary bond with Finn, her compassion for Aunt Margaret’s silence, and the way Philip’s moods saturate every room—Jackson’s novel gives you another house that thinks. Merricat and Constance Blackwood live under a pall of village hatred and family trauma; like the toyshop, their home is a shrine and a trap. The slow‑burn dread, the intimate voice, and even a cathartic blaze echo the tremors that shake Melanie’s world.

If Carter’s baroque sentences and tactile images—dusty velvet curtains, greasepaint, the shocking whiteness of the swan’s feathers—enchanted you, The Passion offers language you can taste. Winterson’s tale of love and obsession moves from Napoleon’s kitchens to icy Venetian canals with the same fevered lyricism Carter uses to make the toyshop feel enchanted and perilous. It’s that luxuriant style—danger wrapped in beauty—that will speak to the part of you that watched Melanie’s awakening unfold in sentences that shimmer and cut.