The best haunted house books

There’s no place like home, especially when it’s Wakefield Manor, where ghosts and memories are trapped in an endless loop. When the introverted, quirky protagonist Sam (who reminded me of my favorite Shirley Jackson character—Merricat Blackwood) is forced to welcome her estranged, pregnant sister back to the decaying family manor, Sam’s already-frayed nerves are pushed to the limit. But when her sister’s arrival becomes the catalyst for disturbing visions of a faceless boy with a penchant for cruelty, Sam seeks answers in the claustrophobic halls of her ancestral home. Who is this monstrous, cruel boy? What does he want? Seething with tumultuous family dynamics and a plot as complex as it is unsettling, the atmosphere of It Will Just Be Us had me enraptured from the very first pages and didn’t let go until the gasp-inducing ending. 

Sarah Temple has ended her relationship with an abusive boyfriend and is now stuck in a dingy apartment living next to some very peculiar people. When her ex is unsuccessful in his attempt at reconciliation, he hooks up with her neighbor. Several days later he emerges as a strange new man. Sarah decides to investigate. And so the adventure begins.

Sometimes extreme horror stories fall short because the authors just want to shock and disgust readers. That’s fine for some, I suppose. But when an author can create a truly good, horrific story and make it disturbing, to boot, It’s a truly winning combination. Harvey Click does just that in The Bad Box. This story is creepy, suspenseful, mysterious, full of action, gory, imaginative, and masterfully written with rich, descriptive language and great imagery:

"A stench of damp dirt and worms and fungus and rotting animals belched up from… show more.

It’s about the simplest idea you can hang a story on: three people discover a house in the wilderness and explore it. But this short, black and white, silent graphic novel just sucked me deeper and deeper into the terror of a place that seems to grow impossibly larger, even as your pathway through it becomes narrower and narrower until...well, it’s pretty dark stuff. Simmons’s art is also inky black, but visualizes the concepts at play with beautiful power. There is a terrible force behind the scenes here, but you can never know what it is and you can never defeat it.  

While there are haunted house-like novels before James’s 1898 classic, this in many ways is a granddaddy of modern haunted tales. An isolated country estate? Check. A creepy housekeeper? Check. Two even creepier children, possibly possessed? Check, check! When the unnamed narrator is hired as the new governess in a remote country home in England, she arrives to find that her two young wards are already nearly corrupted by the ghosts of the former governess and groundskeeper. As she works to save them, the narrator herself is threatened, both by the ghosts and by the children she’s meant to save. The psychological possibilities of this book, however, linger at the edges of the text, threatening to undermine the whole notion of what this haunting really is.

SGJ has such a unique voice, it’s hard to deny this collection its props. Here you have a wide range of themes and unique characterization, and I think there’s a lot to be learned from a collection such as this. Dialogue, character building, tension; this is like a guide to writing good fiction.

I have not infrequently fantasized about running away to a remote Scottish island, so the premise and American protagonist of this novel immediately spoke to me.

Add to that a big creepy house, unexplained ghostly occurrences, and elegant literary writing, and this is a big winner for me. I loved the brooding, sensitive atmosphere of this novel, and it kept me guessing until the end.

If you’ve ever explored an abandoned building, you know what it feels like to approach House of Leaves. This book clocks in at over 700 pages, and it took me a while to work up the courage to dive in.

Danielewski’s groundbreaking horror novel strips away the safety of just reading a story by dragging you right across the book’s threshold. 
House of Leaves is a difficult book to summarize, but one of the chief plotlines follows The Navidson Record, a documentary about a family’s increasingly strange experiences in their house. The structure has dimensions that don’t add up, including ominous hallways and staircases.

Just like the house in the book takes on unexpected shapes, the book in your hands also defies expectations. For me, this created a deeply unnerving, immersive reading experience.

Nothing is more Halloween than a haunted house, especially when that house randomly appears out of nowhere one day.

Jac can’t resist going in and checking it out, after all, it’s not the first time she’s faced death and beat the odds. Besides, things have been weird with her mom since Jac survived cancer, and she could use the distraction. Unfortunately for Jac, the house isn’t going to let her go, and the only way out is through.

This book’s heart elevates the story but make no mistake: this one is for the kids who love horror. This Appearing House is immersed in horror tropes and monsters, and one particular scene (ugh, teeth, *shudder*) still haunts me!

A string of supernatural events occurs when a gay writer moves into a house in the San Diego mountains built by a legendary film star of the 1930s. But the writer is not alone at the house—he has invited his close friends for a housewarming—and they soon discover the deceased actor had some nasty habits and a gruesome behavior. The investigations and resolutions of this absorbing novel unveil some shocking and grisly details, but there is a masterful balance of comedy along with the horror.

This horror novel about a haunted IKEA-like store is playful and fun in every way—from its inventive narrative structure to the book’s mimicry of an IKEA catalogue, complete with a store map and advertisements for furniture that become increasingly deranged.

During daylight, Orsk is a regular furniture store in the suburbs of Cleveland, but when several employees attempt to stay overnight to find out why products keep getting damaged, the building’s dark history begins to bleed into the present. This book perfectly captures the uncanny way nighttime makes familiar landscapes, such as stores and schools, seem entirely unfamiliar, a phenomenon that has always fascinated me. 

I was previously unfamiliar with Elizabeth Hand but this novella had me hooked.

The story concerns a folk-rock band who, decades earlier, stayed at the historic Wylding Hall to write and record an album. But Wylding Hall is full of secrets and mystery, and things happened there that affected them for the rest of their lives.

One of their numbers disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. The house itself behaves in ways that…let's say houses shouldn't behave. All these years later, each of the surviving band members tells their side of the story – their own recollections of what happened during that fateful time and this is the really clever part of the story.

Full of spooky atmosphere and an eclectic cast of characters, I loved this story.

It might be unusual to choose an alphabet book intended for babies and toddlers in a selection of Halloween books, but the art in this book and others in this series is worth collecting, even if you don’t have little ones to share the book with. There have been a lot of little ones reading books on my lap over the years, both my own children and now grandchildren, and I’ve learned that there are certain favorites that I might as well keep close at hand rather than shelve in the hallway with the other picture books. A few years ago I stumbled across B Is for Boo, and I loved the illustrations so much that I have collected nearly a dozen more books in Greg Paprocki’s series of alphabet books. The illustration style might best be described as “retro,” and whether readers grew up in the 1960s like… show more.

In the real estate market of haunted houses, Hill House remains a hot property decades after the book’s publication in 1959.

Shirley Jackson is queen of slow-burn Gothic suspense, and her premise is incredible: a group of strangers arrive at an eerie mansion as part of a scientific project to find evidence of the paranormal.

Jackson doesn’t use flashy jump scares, but rather spins a subtle dread that makes even quiet scenes feel unbearably tense.

Haunting of Hill House remains my top recommendation for scary novels. It’s rare for a book to have me leaving the lights on at night, but after one key scene, I had trouble sleeping for weeks. I don’t hide the fact that I’m a Jackson superfan, and this is one of her best works.

Jennifer Crusie writes some of the funniest heroines I ever met. I adore her voice and I wanted to add her to my list. When I went to Jen’s blog ArghInk to ask her which of her heroines was over forty. She said Andie.

Andie’s ex-husband North wants one last favor from her as closure. Help him settle the two delinquent orphans he inherited from a distant relative. He knows Andie can handle anything.

Her new fiancée isn’t pleased. When Andie meets the two children she quickly realizes things are much worse than she feared. The place is a mess, the children, Carter and Alice, aren't your average delinquents, and the creepy old house where they live is being run by the worst housekeeper since Mrs. Danvers. What's worse, Andie's fiancé thinks this is all a plan by North to get Andie back, and he may be right.

I read… show more.

Pierre the Maze Detective is a series of books, that, unlike my four other recommendations, combines maze solving with a narrative. I could have picked any book from the series, but I particularly liked the Mystery of the Empire Maze Tower. Each spread is a beautifully detailed illustration, somewhat similar to Where’s Waldo?, at first glance, the maze is not obvious, but on closer inspection, through the busyness, you can spy a series of paths subtlety woven into the illustration. I think this book (and the others in the series) offers a wonderful extra dimension to a slightly older solver, someone who can immerse themselves in the story, solve the mazes, and solve the crime!

Isolated locations are the cornerstone for building tension in a slow-burning mystery such as this.

With a strange family keeping secrets from our protagonist, to the quiet unease of something not quite right, the mounting dread of this Gothic tale takes readers on a journey both unique and unsettlingly familiar.

It crawls under your skin and remains, unbidden, like Noemi’s dreams of blood in a house that doesn’t want to let her go, just as the cousin she’s come to rescue seems destined to succumb under the rule of an oppressive family.

The resurgence of Gothic literature this new classic has inspired made it possible for my book to see the light of day.

This remarkable YA haunted house novel, about imperialism, intergenerational trauma, and family legacy, creates a strong sense of unease, which builds towards some frightening and grotesque imagery that stayed with me for a long time. Notably, almost all of the horror occurs after dark.

The descriptions of the narrator’s night terrors are visceral and deeply unsettling, and it is through the murky landscape of dreams that one of the ghost chooses to communicate. In the daytime, the narrator is relatively safe. But at night, in the ethereal space between sleep and wakefulness, the ghosts are more real than the living. I also really enjoyed how the narrator’s queerness plays a central role in the story, but doesn’t entirely define her character.

Edward Gorey is a forever favorite of mine, a pen and ink artist popular for the dozens of strange and macabre little books he created. The West Wing is unique in that it has no words at all, and the story is told entirely through his meticulous pen and ink images. Without a plot, or even any characters, there is only mood and vibes, and they are spooky and mysterious. Each page shows a different part of The West Wing and its seemingly endless rooms with their hints of ghosts and the feeling that someone has just left, or that something horrible has just happened. It’s my favorite haunted house story of all time.

What I love about this story is that it is set very firmly along the traditional lines of a ghostly tale rather than outright horror. It is set against the tragic backdrop of the history of Crickley Hall. 

The suspense is built up beautifully, initially by means of the children and the family dog, who are all nervous and uneasy in their temporary new home. Parents Eve and Gabe also experience strange happenings in the house, but are less willing to admit it, even to themselves. That rings true, for me.

These events are exacerbated by the fact that the entire family is living in the aftermath of a devastating loss. At first, they attribute much of what is happening to their grief, guilt, and sadness. A very normal thing to do, even in such strange circumstances. I love how this is acknowledged, even used as a line of reasoning,… show more.

Scott Thomas was nominated for a Bram Stoker award for his spine-chilling story about four famous horror writers who are invited to spend Halloween in a haunted house as a publicity stunt, only to find themselves tormented by the unholy entity that roams its silent halls. Clearly an expert on the horror genre himself, Thomas brings a much-needed new twist to the haunted house trope and elevates it to a fearsome new level. But this novel’s real strength lies in its character development. A horror story only works if you care enough about the characters to hope (and pray) for their survival, and by the end of this one, you’ll feel like you’re clinging to old, familiar friends as they fight for their lives.