Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson's 1959 ghost story works less by what it shows than by what it withholds: four strangers spend a summer in a house that may or may not be alive, and the real haunting happens inside one woman's head. It is the template most modern horror is still copying.

Jackson's last novel is narrated by eighteen-year-old Merricat Blackwood, who lives with her sister and uncle in a grand house the village despises, six years after most of the family died at the dinner table. It is a gothic told entirely from inside a charming, frightening mind, and it never once flinches.