The FBI and the supernatural are familiar bedfellows in pop culture. For starters, there’s Fox and Mulder in “The X-Files.” Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child gave us Agent Pendergast. Now there’s the welcome addition of FBI agent Odessa Hardwicke and occult investigator John Silence in The Hollow Ones, the new novel from Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan.

Odessa is thrust into a bizarre mystery after she and her partner, Walt Leppo, chase down a random spree killer to a New Jersey home. But after killing the suspect in an exchange of gunfire, Leppo suddenly tries to kill the man’s 9-year-old child, and Odessa is forced to fire on and kill Leppo. In a decidedly twisted turn, Odessa “sees” something she can’t explain leaving his body.

Remanded to desk duty while the Bureau investigates her shooting of Leppo, Odessa is, somewhat conveniently, tasked with cleaning out the desk of retired agent Earl Solomon, who is dying. Solomon urges Odessa to contact John Silence, a man he’s worked with before, to assist her in the case.

Silence—who is based on one of Lovecraft disciple Algernon Blackwood’s characters by the same name—is an enigmatic and mysterious man who seemingly knows everything about Odessa and the threat she is pursuing, which he refers to as a Hollow One, a body-hopping entity addicted to the thrill of experiencing death.

The authors ferry us back and forth in time. Silence is hundreds of years old, thanks to an ancient curse, and is responsible for setting the Hollow One loose in the world. It’s a bit complicated, but suffice it to say there’s a good bit of world building behind the strange goings-on, which all leads up to a modern-day, high-stakes pursuit by Odessa and Silence to capture the entity before it can do more harm.

Hogan and del Toro previously collaborated on the Strain trilogy, a popular series turned short-lived TV show, and The Hollow Ones has TV series written all over it. At the very least, it promises to be the first in a new series of literary adventures, and that’s a good thing, as Silence is a fascinating character you’ll want to see again.

Set in mysterious and witchy woods, The Daughters of Foxcote Manor is the perfect read for mystery lovers who prefer thrills without gore and violence. Author Eve Chase embarks on a deep character study of two women, both of whom are entangled in the tragic events of one summer day in 1971.

Live-in nanny Rita is sent off to Foxcote Manor in the Forest of Dean to care for precocious Teddy and troubled teen Hera while their socialite mother, Jeannie, recovers after the stillbirth of a child. Awkward, shy and utterly devoted to her charges, Rita struggles to balance Jeannie’s depressive episodes with the family’s paranoid patriarch’s demands that Rita act as a spy. When Hera finds an infant abandoned in the forest and Jeannie wants to keep her, Rita is forced into even more lies.

All the while, the forest around them feels claustrophobic and menacing. From the strange arrival of the baby to moved objects to suddenly unlocked gates, Rita feels as if Foxcote Manor is being visited by some sort of supernatural presence.

As the culmination of family secrets comes to a boil in 1971, London makeup artist Sylvie is struggling in present day. Her mother is comatose after a fall, and her teenage daughter is harboring a secret. When Sylvie finds newspaper clippings in her mother’s house about an abandoned infant and a mysterious murder in the Forest of Dean nearly 50 years ago, Sylvie realizes she knows nothing about her family.

The Daughters of Foxcote Manor draws its intensity from the secrets of its main characters, and as the summer of 1971 draws to a close, Chase builds a frenetic momentum. The slightly gothic atmosphere of Foxcote Manor and the surrounding woods adds an element of fear to an already fraught environment. While all the violence happens off-page, the galloping pace and dangers faced by both Rita and Sylvie keep this mystery from ever feeling cozy.

We’ve all heard the saying “You can’t go home again,” but Maggie Holt decides to do it anyway in Riley Sager’s supernatural haunted-house thriller, Home Before Dark.

The 30-year-old interior designer’s father, Ewan, recently died and, to her surprise, left her a house she didn’t realize he still owned: Baneberry Hall, a beautiful Victorian manse located in the woods of Vermont. Twenty-five years ago, Maggie’s parents bought the house for a song because of its tragic and violent history. They optimistically set out to make happy memories there together but after 20 days in the house they fled in terror. Unfortunately, Ewan’s bestselling memoir about their traumatic experiences achieved massive fame and notoriety that have been dogging and defining Maggie ever since. Renovating and selling the gothic mansion seems like an excellent opportunity for her to reckon with her past and put Baneberry Hall behind her at last—especially since she doesn’t remember the events Ewan wrote about (and is highly skeptical that they ever happened in the first place). Sure, her father made her promise to never return to the house, but if you don’t believe in ghosts, they can’t scare or harm you, right?

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Riley Sager shares how he crafted a literary hall of mirrors.

Sager fans know better, of course, and therein lies the fun. As in his previous bestselling thrillers (Final Girls, The Last Time I Lied and Lock Every Door), the author puts a fresh, clever spin on horror tropes, this time with echoes of The Amityville Horror and “The Haunting of Hill House.” And he amps up the tension by alternating chapters of Ewan’s book with Maggie’s musings, thus putting the past and present on a collision course that readers can, but our heroine cannot, see.

Home Before Dark is a compelling and layered mix of taut psychological suspense, genuinely scary haunted-house terrors and the vagaries of memory, capped off with an inventive and satisfyingly wild ending.