As any fan of the Showtime smash-hit will tell you, Yellowjackets is an intense, character-driven story that melds elements of horror, drama, and thriller for an experience unlike any other. If you’ve yet to tune in, you may be wondering: What is Yellowjackets about, exactly? The show follows the fictional Wiskayok High School Yellowjackets, a girls' soccer team whose plane crashes on the way to a national tournament, stranding them in the Canadian wilderness. For more than a year and a half, the survivors do whatever they must to stay alive and get home, making decisions they would have found unthinkable in less dire circumstances.
Decades later, the survivors, who have grown into troubled women with deeply imperfect lives and families, are still dealing with the fallout of their choices and actions during their time in the wild. Throughout both the flashback timeline and the present, they are haunted by the Wilderness, an entity that—whether a real supernatural threat or an eerie device symbolizing their decline in the woods—demands sacrifice.
With the twisty, shocking third season of Yellowjackets about to come to an end, it’s the perfect time to get yourself in the mood with some haunting thrillers, clever satires, and illuminating works of nonfiction that mirror core aspects of the series—deadly terrain and environments, back-stabbing friendships and rivalries, and the lingering effects of trauma and extreme, desperate acts.
One of the main conflicts of the show revolves around public opinion—the Yellowjackets know the realities of what happened to them in the wilderness, but the outside world is more inclined to pass its own judgments than hear them out. Sometimes, it's easier to stay quiet than to subject yourself to the scrutiny of others. In The Silent Ones, when cousins Maddy and Brianna go from ordinary children to suspected criminals, only the girls know the truth—and they're not talking. Their mothers are devastated by the accusations and determined to clear their daughters' names once and for all—even if it means revisiting their own long-buried, life-altering secrets.
Something Yellowjackets does exceptionally well is demonstrate how hard it is for trauma survivors to reintegrate into their former lives. In The Return, Elise, Mae, and Molly learn this firsthand after the sudden reappearance of their friend Julie, who vanished without a trace two years ago. The four meet up to celebrate Julie's return, but Julie is physically and emotionally far different than her friends remember. Is she simply traumatized by the ordeal she has no memory of experiencing, or is something more sinister at work?
Set in Danvers, Massachusetts, We Ride Upon Sticks also centers on a girls’ sports team dealing with dark forces. But it's lighthearted compared to Yellowjackets and takes place about a decade earlier, in the late '80s instead of the '90s. The Falcons, a field hockey team, make a terrible mistake when they make a deal with a malevolent power in exchange for a victory at the state finals. As they confront demonic entities and rival field hockey teams alike, the girls will have to rely on one another to make it to the end of the season and safely back to their true selves.
Being out of contact with the outside world for an extended period of time would be enough to make anyone question reality, but in Wilder Girls, young Hetty may have better reason than most to distrust her senses. Ever since her isolated boarding school was put under quarantine to protect the students from a deadly plague, the remaining girls have not dared to enter the infected woods beyond school grounds. Spurred by the disappearance of her best friend, Hetty takes a bold risk to break quarantine and in the process, makes some terrifying discoveries about the truth behind the plague.
While this sharp, humorous novel is vastly different from Yellowjackets in tone, Beauty Queens also follows a group of teen girls who survive a plane crash and must learn to live in an isolated place on their own. In this case, the girls are contestants in the Miss Teen Dream competition, left to their own devices on a desert island. No one would have expected their group to thrive in such an environment, and yet they manage it, learning to fend for themselves while managing to keep their hair in place.
Out in the wilderness, the Yellowjackets had no one to rely on but each other, even though various quarrels and rivalries often made their relationships hazardous at best. In Primal Animals, Arlee, a troubled queer girl, is sent to summer camp to help prepare her for the rigors of college. But even here, Arlee can't fit in. That is, until she joins a secret society within the camp that welcomes her. When the group endangers the girl Arlee has a crush on, she must uncover the truth before everyone suffers.
When, like the Yellowjackets, you've been through something so unique and so terrible, it seems like the only people who can understand where you're coming from are those who've lived through something unique and terrible too. The Final Girl Support Group adds a clever twist to that concept. Lynnette is one of six trauma survivors attending group therapy sessions to try to deal with the violent events they narrowly escaped. It’s meant to be a safe place, but when their secret meetings are exposed, all will be in danger yet again.
A meticulously researched and gripping true survival story, Madhouse at the End of the Earth is the perfect listen for Yellowjackets fans who want to know more about what can happen to people who are lost and desperate in real life. When the ship Belgica becomes trapped in Antarctic ice in the midst of the dark polar night, her crew falls into despair and begins to turn on each other. Soon, only two members—the expedition's lone American, Dr. Frederick Cook, and the soon-to-be-legendary Roald Amundsen—remain clearheaded enough to hatch a reckless, daring plan to get them out of the ice.
One of the most terrifying aspects of Yellowjackets is the possibility that at least some of the girls were forced to survive through consuming their less fortunate teammates. The searing Audible Original A Certain Hunger also delves into the taboo and disturbing topic of cannibalism. This thriller focuses on Dorothy, a food critic who also happens to be a serial murderer intent on making haute cuisine out of her unfortunate lovers' organs.
Tragically, the story of a group of people getting lost in the wilderness and resorting to cannibalism is not one that simply lives in fiction. The now-infamous Donner Party became stuck in the mountains during a harsh winter on the way to California in the 1840s. After turning down aid from Native Americans offering food, many in the party perished, and those who survived were accused of cannibalism and other gruesome crimes. Desperate Passage is a compelling history listen that recounts what happened to the Donner Party and why.
The Hunger is a fictionalized, fantastical account of the Donner Party's grisly fate. Here, it's not just poor decision-making and lack of planning that doom the travelers—superstition, rumors, and a supernatural threat looming over them all play a key role in their slow, painful demise. If you love Yellowjackets for its grim depiction of an ill-equipped group's struggle for survival against inhospitable nature, this is the thriller for you.
Equal parts boarding school murder mystery and true crime commentary, this novel from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Rebecca Makkai is a knockout audio experience. One of the high points of Yellowjackets is the phenomenal acting, and with Julia Whelan and JD Jackson at the helm, I Have Some Questions for You definitely delivers on performance. The novel's timeline is also a match, with establishing events set in the 1990s while a contemporary timeline follows its 40-something characters navigating the aftermath of public tragedy. Like Yellowjackets, this listen is giving us '90s nostalgia through a Gen X filter.
When a yearly camping trip takes a deadly turn, a scoutmaster and his troops are subjected to horrors they never could have imagined in Nick Cutter's grisly body horror The Troop. Like Yellowjackets, this story is a work of psychological horror that homes in on the deterioration of humanity in remote survival situations. From the moment he and his troop arrive, Scoutmaster Tim feels as if there's a dark air to this expedition the likes of which he hasn't felt before. His deepest fears are confirmed when a stranger stumbles into their campsite, his nightmarish form a harbinger of the disease and death to come.
Small Game is another take on survival fiction that leaves an unwitting group stranded in the wilderness, holding space for nature's beauty and terror alike. This time, our cast of characters are contestants on a survival reality show that's gone horribly wrong, leaving them to wonder whether the newest fork in the road is a scripted challenge or something else entirely. Survivalist educator Mara is joined by a disparate group of teammates whom she soon must rely on in order to make it through each night.
If you're most drawn to the cult-like, feminine-rage-infused bond that unites the surviving Yellowjackets both in the wilderness and in their adult lives back home, Bunny will likely appeal to you. A saga of the dark side of female friendship, the novel follows Samantha, who feels like an outsider in her MFA program at New England's Warren University, where many of her classmates—who call themselves Bunnies—are spoiled elitists. When Samantha is invited into their world, however, she has no way of anticipating the rituals that await.
One of the most disturbing visual elements of Yellowjackets is how their need to kill and cannibalize in order to survive shifts into a kind of indifference with regards to differentiating friends from potential prey. An incisive take on the meat industry and how all humans consume each other in one form or another, Agustina Bazterrica's Tender Is the Flesh opens on a world where all livestock has been killed off after a virus rendered the meat toxic. In their place, humans are farmed for food, but Marcos, a slaughterhouse employee grieving the death of his young son, is at constant odds with the morality of eating our own species.
If there's a prototype for teen survival fiction that meditates on detachment from society and a subsequent loss of innocence, William Golding's classic The Lord of the Flies is just that. When a plane carrying a group of British schoolboys is shot down, crashing on an uninhabited island, the survivors try to maintain order by creating a makeshift society led by the charismatic, orderly Ralph. But Ralph soon finds himself at odds with Jack, a willful, violent boy who chooses to lead his own tribe of dissidents deep into the woods. Before long, the civilization they've built together is threatened by the push-and-pull of human nature, unraveling the tenuous threads that have kept them from going totally feral.
Eileen Gonzalez is a freelance writer from Connecticut. She has a master's degree in communications and years of experience writing about pop culture. She contributes to Book Riot and Foreword Reviews.