The Mansion in the Mist

by Trenton Lee Stewart

Stewart captures that same blend of genuine creepiness wrapped in a puzzle-box mystery that Bellairs perfected—your protagonists are clever kids who stumble into something far darker than they expected, and the atmosphere grows more unsettling as they uncover layers of deception. The pacing mirrors Bellairs' technique of building dread through discovery rather than jump scares.

by Neil Gaiman

Gaiman does what Bellairs does but with a quieter, more lyrical touch—a boy growing up in a graveyard surrounded by ghosts who are genuinely protective rather than purely threatening. There's that same comfort-in-the-uncanny feeling, where the supernatural becomes a refuge, and the real danger comes from the living world outside.

by Barbara Taylor

Here's your curveball: this one's historical fiction about young Ada Lovelace and Mary Shelley solving actual crimes in 1820s London, but it has that same scrappy-kids-against-impossible-odds energy as Bellairs, plus genuine historical mystery layered with gothic London atmosphere. It's proof that period detail and real historical figures can create just as much intrigue as fictional hauntings.

by John Bellairs

Wait—I know you've finished *The Mansion in the Mist*, but if you haven't encountered the Lewis Barnavelt series from the beginning, start here. This 1973 novel has the rawer, more genuinely unsettling tone of Bellairs' earlier work, before some of the later books became more adventure-focused. The clock itself is a masterclass in how to make an inanimate object feel like a malevolent presence.

by Colleen Coover

Craig builds dread the way Bellairs does—through accumulation of small wrongnesses rather than explicit scares—and her isolated mansion setting with a cast of suspicious adults mirrors that claustrophobic feeling you get in Bellairs' best work. The mystery unfolds through journal entries and letters, giving you that same sense of piecing together a puzzle from unreliable sources.