Books Like Below on Netflix: 9 Chilling Sea Folklore Thrillers

I nearly drowned in the Atlantic off the coast of Fire Island as a kid. I was swimming with my best friend before a storm and suddenly the waves got more violent. Luckily, a 65 year old life guard named George swam and saved us both. He also used to climb on a table, rip his pants off, and dance in his Speedo at the summer lobster party. I share this because he is an ICON and I owe him my life.

Small towns based on bodies of water are often isolated, which means 1) they have the best characters you’ll ever meet and 2) they have their own folklore that’s grown over centuries, told by candlelight or over a good ale for generations.

And a lot of these stories, told by quirky people, have a purpose. For kids, maybe telling them to look out for riptides is less effective than saying see that gap in the breaking waves where the water goes darker and flatter, and that line of foam and seaweed sliding out to sea, there’s a sea creature that’ll suck you out to sea and swallow you whole. The latter is a lot more effective.

Below plays in the deep end of this world, and the books like Below on this list have similar vibes and settings.

Is Below on Netflix Based on a Book?

Nope. Below is original, created by Jesse McKeown, who wrote for The Umbrella Academy and 19-2. No novel, no novelization, nothing to track down.

McKeown told Netflix the idea came from the place rather than from a plot. “I’ve been coming to Newfoundland for many years, and it’s become a part of my life,” he said. “It’s such a unique landscape and such a rugged, dangerous, isolated, scary place in a lot of ways. But then there’s also this other side to it, which is that the community is so warm and the people are so funny.”

Hold onto that combination when you’re hunting books like Below, because plenty of novels will hand you a bleak punishing coastline and nothing else. I used the humor as my main filter. A writer who can make you laugh two paragraphs before something awful happens owns you, and they know it.

What Is Below on Netflix About?

Calvin Penney (Josh Hartnett) is a fisherman in the small Newfoundland community of Snooks Arm — a single dad of three, still carrying his own father’s death from decades back, which nobody in town has ever properly explained to him. Then an unidentified sea creature starts terrorizing the coast. Calvin teams up with a visiting marine researcher, Fonda Howander, played by Mackenzie Davis, to work out what it is and, in Netflix’s phrasing, to reveal the island’s buried secrets. Charlie Heaton plays Calvin’s son Wade.

Six episodes, filmed in Newfoundland, all dropping October 8, 2026, with a world premiere in the Primetime program at TIFF. Netflix calls it a blend of local myth, thrilling suspense, and heartfelt humor. The press went with Jaws-meets-Lovecraft.

Also: if you search Below Netflix and get a 2002 submarine horror movie, that’s not you being bad at Google. The title collides with a submarine film, a Darcy Coates novel, a Laurel Hightower novel and a Bravo yacht show, which is half the reason nobody’s written a decent reading list for it.

I’m not going further than the official synopsis, because the rest is the show’s to tell and I’d be making it up. Doesn’t matter — that’s already plenty to pick books from. Closed community. Water that’s always been dangerous. A father who died badly and unexplained. A researcher from away. And a story the locals have been repeating for generations that’s about to turn out to be inconveniently correct.

How I Picked These Books

I have a five-part test for island thriller books, and I built it out of growing up on Fire Island. Total isolation — one way on, one way off, and cell service that dies exactly when you need it. Forced proximity, where everyone knows everyone, so secrets don’t stay secret, they ferment. Nature as a character instead of scenery. Communities packed with personality, because a town of interchangeable people can’t hide anything interesting. And that gorgeous, awful contrast between how beautiful it is and what’s underneath.

For Below I added two more. The folklore has to be load-bearing — delete the legend and the book collapses. And some of these had to be actually funny, because Netflix promised heartfelt humor and monster fiction is, as a genre, hilariously humorless.

And I went hunting for Newfoundland thriller books instead of recycling the same nine ocean horror novels every list uses. (If you want those, I already wrote them up in books like Jaws and isolated thriller books.) Turns out Newfoundland thriller books barely exist as a category, which is why three of the nine here are literary novels that happen to be terrifying. Island town thrillers and small town monster books? Everywhere. Ones set on THAT coast? Almost nowhere.

The 9 Best Books Like Below on Netflix

1. The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey (2020)

It is 1976 on the Caribbean island of Black Conch, and American sport fishermen hook something during a competition that the village has been telling stories about for a thousand years: Aycayia, a Taíno woman cursed into a mermaid by wives who envied her. A local fisherman named David Baptiste is the one who takes her home. Winner of the 2020 Costa Book of the Year, and the closest thing in print to the premise of Below — a fisherman, a creature, and a village whose oldest story turns out to have a body attached to it.

This is the one I’d hand you first. Roffey does the thing almost nobody manages — the folklore isn’t decoration, and it isn’t a metaphor you decode on page 200. The curse just operates. Nobody turns up to explain Aycayia.

So David has to decide what he owes a woman the sea turned into something else, and the island has to decide what it owes both of them, and I promise you not one person involved handles it well.

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2. The Storm Reaper by Kristen Van Nest (2026)

In my writing, I always do a lot of research and weave in true historical context. Stephen King is famous for the American history in his stories, and The Storm Reaper has true American folklore woven into it as well. That comes from my grandmother. She spent years photographing our town’s barns and collecting the stories of the people who kept them, then fought for the ordinances that saved them from being torn down. She believed the history was what made the place itself. When you drive through somewhere, anywhere, it’s the historical buildings that make it feel unique. I want my books to do that for locations I portray, so the history lives on and isn’t lost.

The legend here is the Gray Man of Pawleys Island, South Carolina. On that stretch of coast the folklore says a ghost appears before hurricanes to warn the living: see him and leave, you live; stay, and you die in the storm. On a barrier island where that story gets repeated every season, a serial killer built his method around it. Kill during the storm, let the tide carry the body out, and let the police file another storm-related death.

Violet Crisp was sixteen when she survived the storm that killed her best friend, and the same night she saw a man murdered in the fog. The chief said she was confused by grief. Her own father said she was making it up.

She carried that for TEN YEARS.

Now she’s twenty-six, a patrol officer on Fire Island with her boat and her cat, Purrmaid, a new chief who’s finally listening, another storm coming, and another body washed up. Slow-burn crime thriller, Book 1 of the Violet Crisp series.

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3. Galore by Michael Crummey (2009)

In the Newfoundland outport of Paradise Deep, the villagers cut open a beached whale and find a man alive inside it: wordless, white as bone, and reeking. Two feuding families then spend roughly two centuries arguing about what he means. Crummey won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for it, and it was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award.

If one book here is running the same play as Below, it’s this one. The whale opens, the impossible thing is standing there, and the town doesn’t investigate it so much as absorb it into the gossip.

Which is how folklore actually works in a small place! Nobody convenes a meeting. Somebody’s aunt starts referring to it as settled fact and within a generation it IS one. Fair warning: it moves like a family saga, not a thriller. Read it for the world, not the pace.

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4. Sweetland by Michael Crummey (2014)

The government offers every resident of a remote Newfoundland island a resettlement package to leave for good, on one condition: everyone has to accept. Moses Sweetland, whose family the island is named after, will not sign. Nominated for the Governor General’s Award, nominated for the Dublin Literary Award, and adapted into a feature film shot in Newfoundland.

No creature in this one, and it’s still the pick I feel strongest about — because here’s the detail nobody’s mentioned about the show. Calvin Penney’s town is named after a real place, and the real Snook’s Arm was approved for relocation in 2017 and resettled in 2018. Final population: ten.

Netflix built a monster story on the name of a town that already emptied out without needing one.

What the show does with a creature, Crummey does with a government form and a deadline, which is somehow worse. The last third is one of the most unnerving things I’ve read and not one supernatural thing happens in it.

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If the island-that-eats-people angle is what you are here for, my roundup of cursed island thrillers goes deeper on that specific flavor of dread.

5. Jaws by Peter Benchley (1974)

A great white starts killing swimmers off Amity, a small Long Island resort town, and the mayor decides the town cannot afford to close the beaches. A number one bestseller that produced the 1975 Spielberg film, and the structural template every creature-versus-community story since has either used or deliberately broken.

Read the novel instead of rewatching the movie — they’re not the same animal. The book is meaner, the adultery subplot is very real, and the town politics are grubby in a way Spielberg sanded right off.

That grubbiness is the part worth carrying into Below. Count the people in Amity with a mortgage riding on a busy August and you’ve got most of the plot. (My full breakdown of that lineage is over in books like Jaws.)

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6. The Fisherman by John Langan (2016)

Two widowers meet through work and start fishing together because it is the only thing that helps. They hear about a creek that does not appear on any map, and on the way there, a diner owner tells them the local story of what happened at that water and what a man called Der Fischer traded for. Winner of the 2016 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel.

Langan stops the novel dead in the middle so a diner owner can talk for a hundred pages, and those hundred pages are the best thing in it. The two widowers are just the guys who walked in and heard it.

Now, it’s set at a reservoir in upstate New York, not on a coast, so it flunks my entire saltwater criteria and I genuinely do not care. On folklore-as-engine it’s the strongest book here after Roffey. (If that’s your register, see also folk horror books.)

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7. The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (1993)

A failing newspaperman named Quoyle takes his two daughters to his ancestors’ village in Newfoundland, gets a job covering car wrecks and the shipping news, and gradually finds out what his family did there and why the house is tied down with cables. Won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award.

This is the proof that “heartfelt humor” and a body count can share a book. Proulx gives you a drowned man, a decapitation, and a running joke about local journalism inside roughly forty pages, and none of it reads like whiplash. The ancestral secret in the Quoyle family is also the exact beat Calvin Penney is stuck on.

Nobody’s shelving this as a thriller. Read it anyway, for the village and for the way she builds a sentence.

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8. Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero (2017)

The Blyton Summer Detective Club solved the lake monster case in 1977, unmasked a guy in a costume, got their photo in the paper, and then quietly fell apart. Thirteen years later the survivors are variously institutionalised, on the run, and dead, and they go back to Oregon because the official story they signed off on was a lie.

Take the Scooby-Doo premise seriously for one second and it turns horrifying — a bunch of kids were told the thing in the water was a man in a mask, they believed it, and they were WRONG.

Cantero is the only writer here who’s funny on purpose, line by line, while something genuinely nasty happens in a lake. If you want the humor-braided-into-suspense thing in print, this is it.

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9. Devolution by Max Brooks (2020)

Mount Rainier erupts, and a smug high-tech eco-village called Greenloop discovers that its entire lifestyle depended on a road. Cut off, out of deliveries, and increasingly aware that something large is circling, the residents have to decide what they actually believe about the local legend. Told through a survivor’s journal, from the author of World War Z, and optioned by Legendary Entertainment.

Brooks is running the Jaws structure with the shark swapped out, and he gets the part most monster novels miss: the community argues about what it is for way too long, because admitting what it is means admitting the road isn’t coming back. (Every disaster is a real estate problem eventually.)

Not coastal, nothing in the water, here purely on structure. Best pure siege book on the list, and the best straight-up entry point if small town monster books are what you actually came for.

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Why Sea Folklore Makes the Best Thrillers

Natural disasters make for great thrillers because you get people at their wits’ end who become a threat, taking advantage of the chaos — and you also get a storm that’s its own villain, stalking in and taking people out. A double threat. You’re never only fighting the weather. You’re fighting whoever’s using it.

Sea folklore is what a community builds when it lives with that double threat long enough. Somebody doesn’t come home. The water offers no explanation and no body. So the town writes one.

And the story it writes does two jobs at once. Grieving families get something they can live with. And kids learn a rule they’ll ACTUALLY follow, which is more than any safety lecture ever managed: leave when you see the man in gray.

Which is exactly why folklore is such good machinery for a thriller writer, and why the best sea creature thrillers outlast the sea monster books where something just arrives and starts eating people. A legend is a container the whole town has already agreed not to open. So you can put a murder in there. Or a bad decade. Or the reason nobody says that family’s name down at the wharf.

When Below promises the creature will reveal the island’s buried secrets — that’s the promise. Something big enough to force the lid.

With the climate crisis we’re getting more and more devastating storms where families sitting in their peaceful homes are suddenly living in a nightmare, and that’s a big part of why these keep landing. They’re not escapism anymore. People pick them up to watch somebody survive the thing they’re afraid is genuinely coming.

Which is why I wrote mine into that tradition instead of inventing a monster, and why I’d file island thriller books like it next to Crummey and not next to the creature features. If that’s the itch, my hurricane thriller books list is built entirely around it.

What to Read Next

The Storm Reaper is my island town thriller about a serial killer who’s been using hurricanes to wash his kills and any evidence out to sea — and the one woman who finally figured out the pattern, who nobody trusts.

FAQ: Books Like Below on Netflix

Is Below on Netflix a True Story?

No. There’s no Newfoundland sea creature case behind it. But the place name is real — Snook’s Arm sits on the Baie Verte Peninsula, and it was resettled in 2018, which is also the plot of Sweetland at number four above. Filming happened in the province, so the coastline and the dialect are real. The creature and the living town aren’t.

What Are the Best Books Like Below on Netflix?

The strongest matches are The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey, Galore and Sweetland by Michael Crummey, Jaws by Peter Benchley, and The Fisherman by John Langan. My own The Storm Reaper is a sea creature thriller adjacent pick — no creature, but the same machinery, where a real coastal ghost legend gives a killer a decade of cover on Fire Island.

When Does Below Come Out on Netflix?

The Below Netflix release date is October 8, 2026, and all six episodes land at once instead of weekly. It also screens in the Primetime program at TIFF on September 10, 2026, which is why reviews show up before anybody can actually stream it.

What Shows Like Below Should I Watch Next?

Everyone keeps naming the same two: From, for the trapped-community dread, and Widow’s Bay, for the small coastal town whose folklore turns out to be operational. People hunting shows like Below usually want the paranoia, not the creature effects, and those two deliver. If it’s the Newfoundland texture you’re after, the 2001 film of The Shipping News was shot in a fishing village there and does the same work with zero monsters.

What Are the Best Island Town Thrillers?

The ones that work all share the same trap: you can’t leave and everybody already knows your business. The Mermaid of Black Conch and Galore are the strongest on this list, and Jaws invented the template. My own The Storm Reaper is a small town monster book in everything but the monster — the thing hunting Fire Island is a person, and the storm is what hides him.

What Should I Read for the Folklore in Below?

Go to The Fisherman first, where a told legend is literally the middle of the book, then Galore for folklore running a whole town’s history. If you want American coastal folklore specifically, The Storm Reaper borrows from the same well as most sea folklore thrillers: the Gray Man of Pawleys Island, a real legend about a ghost who appears before hurricanes to warn people off the island.

Are Sea Monster Books and Sea Creature Thrillers the Same Thing?

Not quite, and the difference decides whether you’ll like this list. In a sea monster book you’re there for the encounter — the creature is the point. A sea creature thriller keeps the creature offstage most of the time and uses it to squeeze a town until people start lying to each other. Below is obviously the second kind, which is why almost every book above is about a town first and a thing with teeth second.

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