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.
With the second season of Yellowjackets now streaming, 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, the new 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 now 40-something characters navigating the aftermath of public tragedy. Like Yellowjackets, this listen is giving us '90s nostalgia through a Gen X filter.
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.
