They mostly don’t return, but how about Picnic At Hanging Rock?
Speaking of which, if you want to contrast mystery zone fiction where the mystery is explained with mystery zone fiction where it isn’t, you can compare the book versions of Picnic at Hanging Rock, 2001, and The Shining - in all those cases the books were more explicit about what was going on, whereas the movie version deliberately made things more mysterious.
(Interesting that two of those examples involve Stanley Kubrick. Also interesting that Arthur C. Clarke, after taking pains to explain things in the novel version of 2001, created a deliberately unexplained mystery zone in Rendezvous with Rama … though I guess he might have explained it in later Rama books, I never read 'em.)
Yeah, having come to the movie 2001 after reading the book, I’ve never had the same response as most people to the ending, because I’ve always seen it through the lens of the novel, so it’s perfectly clear what’s happening.
What about the original story, and the more recent movie, The Color Out of Space? One might say that this is more about a normal area becoming a kind of ‘mystery zone’ through certain events.
I don’t know the Stargate series (seemed too pulp for my taste), but Gateway is a fantastic novel. Very internal and weird and probably very close in tone to some of the works in your original post. Told partially through transcripts of the sessions the protagonist has with a psychologist AI.
The sequels I never read but look terrible.
I don’t think “good” is the right adjective for Stargate (the TV shows), but I did watch quite a bit of them and was entertained.
Oh, and my kids are currently obsessed with the TV show “Gravity Falls”, which is one big mystery zone.
Stranger Things
Coraline (book and film). Also the Chronicles of Narnia.
The Terror
Coraline
Neverwhere
Narnia
The Magicians (at least Fillory)
(ops, got snipped on a couple)
The dog park in Welcome to Nightvale, although the surrounding area is so weird that it may not make be a great example.
You are in a fertile area though, much of the Lovecraft canon is probably in this trope.
The Nameless City
The Mound
Dagon
The Music of Erich Zann
The Strange High House in the Mist
The Shadow Out of Time
Many are in non-physical “mystery zones” such as the Dreamland cycle, all the Randolph Carter stories, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, From Beyond, Hypnos, etc.
Diaspora by Greg Egan, but it’s not a central plot. I was thinking of another book by Egan, but can’t remember which, where it’s more central.
Though you could argue that Narnia, Wonderland, Oz, etc. aren’t mystery zones as such - i.e. places where explaining why they are the way they are is important … or even places where deliberately not explaining things but teasing the reader to try to figure it out is important. Those fairytale places Just Are.
And At the Mountains of Madness, probably. Most Lovecraft stories I guess.
Control has “mystery objects” that more often than not result in “mystery zones”. Also the astral plane in that same game. And for those who like to read lore, there are lots of mentions of such mystery places and objects scattered everywhere in the game.
A few places are mysterious by nature, though they often look ordinary at first. The Old House, the Oceanview Motel, a certain mirror, the slides… fantastic stuff for fans of mysterious places. ;)
All the “lost world,” “lost race,” and “dinosaur valley” locales from the late 19th and early 20th:
The Coming Race by Bulwer-Lytton
The Moon Pool by AA Merritt
Dwellers in the Mirage by AA Merritt
The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle
Pellucidar novels by ER Burroughs
King Solomon’s Mines by H Rider Haggard
She by H Rider Haggard
[edit]Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James somebody
MS Found in a Bottle (or whatever it is) by Poe
Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge!
All of William Hope Hodgson’s stories about the Sargasso
The Boats of the Glen Carrig by WH Hodgson
The House on the Borderland by WH Hodgson
Per the OP I’m sticking to locales in a normal world, not other dimensions like the Negative Zone or the Astral Plane or the Mirror Universe or whatever.
Lost City of Z
Black Hole
Literally anything dealing with Atlantis
Interstellar