If you loved how Olive used the enchanted spectacles to step into the McMartin paintings and navigate Elsewhere, you’ll click with Coraline squeezing through that small door into the Other side. Both girls face a beguiling but predatory presence—Annabelle and Aldous’s lingering influence on one side, the Other Mother on the other—and must rely on nerve, cleverness, and small helpers to escape a trap that looks like home. Coraline captures that same shivery, imaginative thrill of crossing the line between rooms and realms.

Like Olive piecing together the McMartin family’s past—following cryptic hints, peeking into forbidden rooms, and realizing the house itself keeps secrets—Milo and Meddy spend a snowed-in week unraveling Greenglass House’s mysteries. Instead of haunted canvases, there are smugglers’ codes, stolen artifacts, and disguises, but it delivers that same cozy-conspiratorial feeling of investigating creaky staircases and locked cupboards to uncover the truth behind a home’s ghosts.

If Horatio, Harvey, and Leopold—the sharp-tongued guardian cats of the McMartin house—were a highlight for you, Mogget will be irresistible. He’s a cat-shaped, ancient being who aids Sabriel as she confronts necromancy and cursed places. Much like Olive relying on her feline guides while the rules of Elsewhere stay slippery, Sabriel must decide when to trust a witty, not-always-forthcoming companion whose help can save her—or complicate everything.

Annabelle McMartin’s menace and Aldous’s dark enchantments give The Shadows its delicious chill. In City of Ghosts, Cassidy Blake slips beyond the Veil into Edinburgh’s haunted side, where a vengeful Red Raven feeds on the living. As Olive learns the cost of crossing into paintings, Cassidy learns the rules—and dangers—of the space between worlds. Both stories balance brave curiosity with the real bite of dark magic.

If the tight, haunted intimacy of the McMartin home drew you in—every portrait watching, every passageway a clue—then Lewis Barnavelt’s uncle’s mansion will feel wonderfully familiar. Lewis, like Olive, is new to both house and magic; he explores ticking walls, hidden chambers, and dangerous spells tied to the home’s grim past. The focus stays close—one boy, one house, mounting dread—and pays off with clever, spooky discoveries.