The best books that are both literary and gothic

She’s more famous for novels like Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence, but I love Edith Wharton above all for her ghost stories. I especially admire "Afterward," which, for my candy corn, is the greatest literary ghost story ever written. It both chills me and makes me ponder; the emotions inside this complex tale of secret lives are so real that, after I’ve put it down, I find I want to talk to anyone else who has read it about what just happened.

Wharton handles both language and imagery with a deft touch, all while drawing the reader into a haunting that has more than one dimension.

Are there any ghosts in the most famous ghost story of all time, "The Turn of the Screw"? Fans have been debating that for over a century. I am awed and frequently challenged by James’ prose style, in which so much is rendered carefully ambiguous.

In his greatest offerings—"The Jolly Corner," "The Real Right Thing," and, a personal fave, "The Friends of the Friends"—he was able to elevate Gilded Age ghost stories to the realm of high art. Among his most central gifts was a Hawthorne-inspired interest in the nature of guilt, self-deception, and the spectral world inside our minds.

I recently visited Henry James’ grave in Cambridge and found that anonymous fans continue to leave him little tributes to this day.

The wonderful Robert Aickman; the first time I read some of what he called his “strange tales,” I knew I wasn’t ever going to forget the experience. Unnerving in the best possible way, there’s no one quite like Aickman for invoking a world that is half-waking, half-fever dream, somehow outside us and horribly inside our heads us all at once.

I could easily have picked any of his story collections, from The Wine-Dark Sea to the wonderfully titled Cold Hand in Mine, but Dark Entries contains his masterpiece, "Ringing the Changes." It’s a story about a May-December couple on honeymoon who find themselves in a town of the dead. I read it every Hallowe’en for the simple pleasure of Aickman’s craft.

I am a huge fan of the very-brief gothic. It’s so hard to do well; trivial jump-scares are easy, but to produce a meaningful effect in only a few pages takes real precision. Shirley Jackson holds the crown with "The Lottery," but my second favorite instance of a surprisingly quick read that produces a real gasp is Angela Carter’s mini-treasure, "The Werewolf."

It manages to be a fairy tale, feminist critique, a witch, and a werewolf story all at once—and, like the beast in the title, it may not be what it appears. Also wonderful to me are "The Company of Wolves," "The Snow Child," and the eponymous "The Bloody Chamber," that one a revisioning of "Bluebeard"—essentially, Carter updates all kinds of dark fairy tales, bringing out their subversive shadows for a savvy reader. Still so fresh to this day.

I read a lot of gothic literature, and very little actually scares me. This book does. Every time I return to this book, which I do every year, always after dark, in a silent place, I get that anxious chill that makes me want to pause, pull my collar a little tighter, and look around the room, just to be sure.

Jackson’s novel also has what I think is the finest opening paragraph in any work of the literary gothic, an opener so unexpected and so poetic that I know I’m in for more than a typical haunted house story. Picking up on "The Fall of the House of Usher," picking up on "The Turn of the Screw," and influencing everything that came after her, Jackson gives us a dark mirror of a setting—a story, above all, of a haunted mind.