If you were drawn to how Gentry lives in denial while something ancient and hungry rules from beneath the slag heap—and to Mackie’s uneasy ties to the underground powers who took Natalie—you’ll love the way Fairfold treats its horned boy in the glass coffin like a tourist attraction until he wakes. In The Darkest Part of the Forest, siblings Hazel and Ben reckon with bargains, changelings, and a town complicit in its own myth-soaked dangers, echoing Mackie’s struggle to face the truth about the creatures who keep his town “safe.”

The creeping dread that follows Mackie into tunnels and abandoned places—and the bloody price the Lady demands from Gentry—finds a kindred chill here. In Anna Dressed in Blood, ghost hunter Cas faces a murderous spirit bound by grisly rules. The violence is stark, the atmosphere thick with dread, and the moral lines blur much like when Mackie weighs saving Natalie against the town’s long-accepted rituals.

Mackie’s journey—from hiding who he is to owning his changeling nature to rescue Natalie—mirrors Alice’s descent into her grandmother’s Hinterland tales. In The Hazel Wood, Alice discovers she’s tied to a story that wants her blood. That same prickly, intimate unraveling of identity you felt when Mackie confronted the Lady’s court plays out as Alice pushes past secrets, bargains, and the sharp edges of a living fairy tale.

If the most gripping parts of The Replacement were inside Mackie’s head—the shame about what he is, the iron sickness, the way he tries to protect Emma and help Tate while fearing the underworld owns him—this will hit hard. Conor is visited by a monster that forces him to face truths he doesn’t want to admit. The emotional honesty and grief-twined dread echo Mackie’s private reckoning with the town’s terrible bargain.

Gentry’s quiet complicity—the way everyone looks away while the Lady takes what she’s owed, leaving a dead thing in Natalie’s place—resonates with Sparrow’s yearly curse. In The Wicked Deep, drowned witches return to claim boys as the town shrugs, and Penny must decide what she’s willing to risk to break the cycle. It’s the same haunting cocktail of small-town secrecy, dangerous bargains, and dark magic that Mackie finally refuses to accept.