The Haunting of Hill House

I read this late at night when the rest of my family had gone to bed; big mistake. I proceeded to stay awake until five a.m., at which point I was so exhausted that I was able to turn off the lights and go to sleep, not even caring if my house ate me. (Spoiler: it didn't.)

The book is more than just a terrifyingly effective ghost story, though. As talented as Jackson is at evoking dread in her readers, she's even better at exploring the banal yet terrible moments of human disconnection. And then she ties the two together in a fascinatingly unreliable narrative, in which you're often unsure whether the characters' unnatural behavior is due to their being strangers pushed into an uncomfortable intimacy with each other, or instead due to the supernatural effects of Hill House.