The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson might seem an unlikely pioneer of the supernatural horror genre. A housewife who lived in Bennington, Vermont, she is best known for the large number of short stories in which she exposed the dark underbelly of small town American life. The Haunting of Hill House, her penultimate novel (first published in 1959), is a chilling and highly accomplished piece of writing, justly described by Stephen King as one of the most important horror novels of the 20th century.

Dr Montague, an anthropologist whose true passion is the supernatural, rents the supposedly cursed titular building in order to investigate the existence of psychic disturbances. His guests are the house's heir, Luke, and two women with previous experience of the paranormal, Theodora and Eleanor. The group bond almost immediately, but fear is a corrosive emotion and the house's manifestations soon cause cracks to appear.

Jackson treats her material – which could be reduced to penny dreadful stuff in less deft hands – with great skill and subtlety. A background cast of characters adds a welcome note of comedy: the housekeeper, Mrs Dudley, is possessed of a limited repertoire of conversation ("We couldn't hear you, even in the night. No one could… in the night. In the dark"), which she intones in a not entirely straight-faced manner.

The horror inherent in the novel does not lie in Hill House (monstrous though it is) or the events that take place within it, but in the unexplored recesses of its characters' – and its readers' – minds. This is perhaps why it remains the definitive haunted house story.