Top 25 Best Ghost Story Books

Rank 1

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

by M.R. James

Renowned for their wit, erudition and suspense, these stories are each masterfully constructed and represent a high achievement in the ghost genre. The details of horror are almost never explicit, the stories relying on...

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Rank 2

The Shining

by King, Stephen

Disclaimer: Avoid King books if you're sensitive to the overuse of adverbs. Second disclaimer: The movie and the book are quite different, but neither will ruin you for the other since they're both excellent.King has spo...

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Rank 3

Ghost Story

by Straub, Peter

In a seedy motel in Florida, a young man holds captive a little girl in a soiled pink dress. He is anxious, tormented, introspective. She is calm, passive, strangely detached. She says her name is Angie Maule.

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Rank 4

The Haunting of Hill House

by Shirley Jackson

First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House:...

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Rank 5

The Woman in Black

by Susan Hill

In the process of settling an estate, Arthur Kipps finds himself confronted with some very unsettling matters.

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Rank 6

The Turn of the Screw

by Henry James

The governess of two enigmatic children fears their souls are in danger from the ghosts of the previous governess and her sinister lover.

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Rank 7

Ligeia

by Edgar Allan Poe

This book contains Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 short story, “Ligeia”. An anonymous narrator recounts the story of his meeting a beautiful and intellectual woman "in some large, old decaying city near the Rhine." They get marr...

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Rank 8

Hell House

by Matheson, Richard

Rolf Rudolph Deutsch is going die. But when Deutsch, a wealthy magazine and newpaper publisher, starts thinking seriously about his impending death, he offers to pay a physicist and two mediums, one physical and one ment...

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Rank 9

Ghost Summer: Stories

by Tananarive Due

A collection of short stories from Tananarive Due, mixing ghosts, family secrets and everyday fears in the American South.

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Rank 10

Dark Matter

by Michelle Paver

'What is it? What does it want? Why is it angry with me?' January 1937 Clouds of war are gathering over a fogbound London. Twenty-eight year old Jack is poor, lonely and desperate to change his life. So when he's offered...

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Rank 11

Anna Dressed in Blood

by Kendare Blake

For three years, seventeen-year-old Cas Lowood has carried on his father's work of dispatching the murderous dead, traveling with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat, but everything changes when he mee...

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Rank 12

The Haunting of Blackwood House

by Darcy Coates

As the daughter of spiritualists, Mara's childhood was filled with séances and scam mediums. Now she's ready to start over with her fiancé, Neil, far away from the superstitions she's learned to loathe... but her past is...

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Rank 13

Joyland

by King, Stephen

Verano de 1973. Carolina del Norte. El joven universitario Devin Jones consigue trabajo en un pequeño parque de atracciones llamado Joyland. Allí se encarga de las tareas de mantenimiento, se disfraza de la mascota del p...

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Rank 14

The Secret of Crickley Hall

by James Herbert

a family moves into a manner of sorts because the father has a job, and almost at the first a strange phenomena starts to begin, a small child shows its self first, as he cries from a cupboard.

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Rank 15

Ring

by Koji Suzuki

Stunning, cutting-edge thriller with a chilling supernatural twist from Japan's stylish new literary star. Asakawa is a hardworking journalist who has climbed his way up from local-news beat reporter to writer for his ne...

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Rank 16

Heart-Shaped Box

by Hill, Joe

Judas Coyne is a collector of the macabre: a cookbook for cannibals . . . a used hangman's noose . . . a snuff film. An aging death-metal rock god, his taste for the unnatural is as widely known to his legions of fans as...

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Rank 17

The Amityville Horror

by Jay Anson

The Amityville Horror is a book by American author Jay Anson, published in September 1977. It is also the basis of a series of films released from 1979 onward. The book is claimed to be based on the paranormal experience...

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Rank 18

The Ghost Bride

by Choo, Yangsze

1893, Malaysia. Li Lan, the daughter of a genteel but bankrupt family, has few prospects. But fate intervenes when she receives an unusual proposal from the wealthy and powerful Lim family. They want her to become a ghos...

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Rank 19

This House is Haunted

by John Boyne

1867. Eliza Caine arrives in Norfolk to take up her position as governess at Gaudlin Hall on a dark and chilling night. As she makes her way across the station platform, a pair of invisible hands push her from behind int...

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Rank 20

The Seance

by John Harwood

A haunting tale of apparitions, a cursed manor house, and two generations of women determined to discover the truth, by the author of The Ghost Writer Sell the Hall unseen; burn it to the ground and plow the earth with s...

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Rank 21

The Little Stranger

by Sarah Waters

Abundantly atmospheric and elegantly told, *The Little Stranger* is Sarah Waterss most thrilling and ambitious novel yet. After her award-winning trilogy of victorian novels, sarah waters turned to the 1940s and wrote th...

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