Authors Like Jason Rekulak

The nearest match for Hidden Pictures. Sager writes fast, twisty thrillers set in old houses with something wrong in them, and Home Before Dark — a woman returns to the mansion her father made famous with a haunted-house memoir — has the same fair-play reveals and the same relish for a last-chapter reversal. If you finished Hidden Pictures in a night, start here.

The clearest bridge is Duma Key, in which an injured man starts to paint and the paintings start to come true. A child's drawings that reveal what is really going on is Hidden Pictures in a nutshell. King is also the master of the ordinary place gone wrong that both writers lean on.

A painting sits at the heart of The Silent Patient, and so does a twist that rewrites everything before it. Michaelides plots the way Rekulak does — plainly written, relentlessly paced, with a reveal that feels inevitable only afterwards.

My Best Friend's Exorcism sets a possession story in 1988 Charleston, with a friendship at its center and a soundtrack of pop-culture detail. It is horror that is funny, warm and properly frightening in turns — the same blend that makes Rekulak's books so easy to read and so hard to forget.

Quirk Books published Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children while Rekulak ran the house, and the book shows what that list was about: a story built around strange old photographs that sit right there on the page. For Hidden Pictures readers who liked the book as an object, this is the natural next stop.

For the half of Rekulak that loves 1980s gadgets and games. Ready Player One is an entire novel built from arcades, Atari and John Hughes, with a hunt at the center that keeps the pages moving. It shares The Impossible Fortress's belief that the things you obsess over as a teenager are never trivial.

Eleanor & Park is a 1986 love story told through mixtapes, comic books and the school bus — the closest romantic match for The Impossible Fortress. Rowell has the same gift for making two awkward kids feel enormous and for being funny and wrenching in the same sentence.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow follows two friends who build video games together across thirty years, with all the love and rivalry that involves. It is a grown-up cousin of The Impossible Fortress, whose heroes bond over code, and it is just as good on how making something with another person can become the most important relationship of your life.

Where the warm half of Rekulak's voice has its roots. High Fidelity is a funny, tender novel about a man whose life is organized around pop culture and who is slow to notice what matters. If the nostalgia and the jokes in The Impossible Fortress are what you loved, Hornby is the grown-up version.