14. It’s an odd fact that the popularity of Scandi-noir, with all its focus on austere realism, can be partly attributed to the story of a friendship between a lonely boy and the vampire next door. It’s true, though; Let the Right One In was as crucial to the explosion of Scandinavian fiction as Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman or Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Though it has its fair share of blood, teeth, and torn flesh, the heart of Lindqvist’s novel is the bond between the bullied Oskar and the fanged Eli. While the novel offers disturbing implications for the future of their relationship, their coming together reads like the darkest of fairy tales. Few novels have ever welded brutality and compassion so seamlessly. It’s a book that could only have originated in the bleak romance of the Swedish winter.

13. Some argue that time travel makes Kindred more properly a science fiction novel. But when that temporal journey plunges Dana, a contemporary African-American woman, back in time to the Antebellum South, the horror of the situation is all too apparent. There, Dana meets her ancestors and endures a disturbing relationship with Rufus, her friend-turned-master. As with all of Butler’s work, Kindred is overflowing with meaning and metaphor, but it’s most powerful when it connects Dana’s personal torture with the broader historical devastation of slavery. As Butler herself explained, “I couldn’t let [Dana] come back whole.” Just as Dana leaves something of herself in the past, the reader loses a part of themselves in Butler’s novel.

11. Dan Simmons loves research. Whether it’s the final days of Charles Dickens in Drood or the practicalities of mountaineering in The Abominable, he’s rarely one to let a good story get in the way of the facts. The Terror is different. It’s an exceedingly good story, enhanced rather than hindered by meticulous historical detail. The novel concocts a solution to the mystery of the Franklin Expedition, which in 1845 set sail to locate the Northwest Passage. The ships were not seen again until 2016. Over 700 torturous pages, Simmons elaborates on what few details we know, fleshing out a saga of murder, cannibalism, and suffering. Something deadly lurks out on the ice, but there’s already enough monstrosity inside, amongst the freezing, hungry crew members. The Terror is simply the best historical horror novel ever written. It puts a chill in your bones and makes you glad for the armchair you’re reading in.

10. Is there any more pivotal story in the English-speaking world than Frankenstein? The Iliad and Hamlet might make their claim, but neither of those are still read as often, or remain as readable, as Mary Shelley’s immortal novel. Even its origins have become iconic—the result of a ghost story competition between bored poets in the ‘year without a summer’ of 1816. Much is made of Frankenstein as the first modern work of science fiction. That’s true, but it doesn’t do to overlook the raw horror at work in the miscreation, malformation, and murderous loneliness of Frankenstein’s monster. There are few revelations in all of horror that match Frankenstein’s reaction, “when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open,” or the monster’s chill promise that “I will be with you on your wedding night.” Of course, those who have not read the novel may think Frankenstein is about man versus monster. In truth, it’s the story of a neglected child and a cruel father. It is a violent tragedy that can still stir the soul to pity two hundred years later.

9. We have covered a whole raft of vampires on this list, but none would exist if not for Dracula. Stoker’s novel established so much about the pop culture vampire that when creators try to shuck off its influence, it often just refocuses the attention onto what is missing. Though the plot and style of the novel may differ from many of the interminable adaptations it inspired, what always comes through is the Count’s lethal charisma. Stoker’s Count is a seducer, as modern in his pan-sexuality as he is ancient in years. It’s a casting of the vampire that remains more alluring—and more frightening—than any subsequent revision. After all, if the rule is that the vampire must be invited to enter, the Count’s charm gives him a good chance of getting through your window. Add a company of likable heroes, a spider-devouring lunatic, and the hideous fate of Lucy Westenra, and Dracula becomes both a wonderful Gothic romp and the closest thing that horror has to an authentic modern myth.

8. The easiest way to describe this brain-twisting novel is to say that it does for the possession story what Wes Craven’s Scream did for the slasher movie. A young family invites a reality TV film crew into their home to film their daughter Marjorie’s potential demonic possession. Most of the story is told in flashback by Marjorie’s sister, Merry, as well as through blog posts that deconstruct the TV show. As a result, everything is compromised by memory or media. In this world, everyone is aware of the existing possession horror tropes. Does that make what is happening more authentic, or less? There is very little steady ground in Tremblay’s novel, and no clear view of the truth. With so many layers of misdirection and doubt, A Head Full of Ghosts becomes a self-referential, self-questioning nightmare­—both the creepiest and cleverest approach to the possession story that you will find.

7. A single chapter of Beloved contains more pain than most novels can manage from first page to last. That scene, in which Sethe murders her baby to spare her from a life of enslavement, is horribly, appallingly based in fact. Everything that follows is an attempt to bear the weight of personal and national trauma in fiction. The ghost story, it turns out, is the perfect vehicle. When a young woman appears bearing the name of Sethe’s dead infant, she seems to be a blessing. Soon, however, she begins to consume Sethe’s life, and tears open psychological wounds that the freed characters are desperately trying to hold closed. Morrison’s novel is lyrical and fragmentary (terms that tend to suggest an emphasis on style rather than satisfactory story), but Beloved offers both. It is a truly Great American Novel, both a literary testament to the suffering of millions and one of the most emotionally profound ghost stories ever composed.

5. The Little Stranger is a very British ghost story set in the decaying Hundred’s Hall at the post-war end of ‘big houses’ and the gentry. Rather than her usual LGBTQ perspectives, Waters adopts the straight, male Dr. Faraday as our window on this era of social upheaval. He is an unreliable narrator for the ages; every incident is filtered through his conflicted feelings towards the house and its unmarried mistress, Caroline Ayers. By the time the novel builds to its climax, the reader is left wondering if Faraday’s suppressed resentment is not more frightening than your typical ghost. It’s a dense novel, mired in the leaden atmosphere of an overcast afternoon. It’s also more interested in psychology than the paranormal, even though, like all truly great ghost stories, it does suggest that those two realms are far more intertwined than we would like to admit. Waters never intended her political novel to be about a haunted house, but it doesn’t matter. The Little Stranger still turned out to be the finest ghost story of the 21st century so far.

4. Stephen King has written many times about the ‘bad place,’ but never to more terrifying effect than in the Overlook Hotel. Possibly the most famous location in all of modern horror, it is not simply haunted, but more a battery for evil: a brick-and-mortar manifestation of demonic forces. When the Torrance family agrees to caretake the hotel over the winter, we know long before them that it will not turn out well. There will always be debate about the relative merits of Kubrick’s adaptation, but however much you appreciate his film, it has none of the tragedy or the warmth—and therefore none of the true terror—that King makes us feel for the Torrances. As the winter closes in and the hotel wakes up, King kneads the reader’s emotions like dough, showing us how much these people love each other, despite their underlying resentments. A final moment between Jack and his son elevates the book beyond anything Kubrick’s cold vision can offer. In future decades, when readers consider the enduring classics of the genre, The Shining will stand out as the perfect fusion of human drama and supernatural menace.

3. Jackson’s novel opens with the greatest introduction to haunted architecture ever written: “Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within … and whatever walked there, walked alone.” It is an epochal moment in horror, the transition from a haunted house as a site of re-enacted trauma to a place that is inherently ill-intentioned. The ghosts of Hill House don’t make sense; “ghost” may not even be the correct word for whatever walks there. When Eleanor Vance joins a group of paranormal investigators interested in Hill House’s benighted reputation, there is the sense that she is not so much the victim of what occurs as the cause. In one novel, Jackson moved the ghost story from the realm of the moral and historical into the psychological. Over half a century later, The Haunting of Hill House remains as elusive as ever. It is still the benchmark by which all modern stories of the supernatural must be judged.