Daniel Mallory Ortberg is the author of The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror. Two of six scary stories or story collections he tagged at the Guardian:If you want to spend an absolutely panicked evening writhing under a book, you can’t go wrong with Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. It features one of the most memorable and deeply sympathetic horror protagonists I’ve ever come across, and has one of the best opening paragraphs in literature: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stoodRead about another entry on the list.by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. ” But, for all the new Netflix series, everyone only gets to read Jackson for the first time once. So if you’re an old Jackson hound but haven’t got round to her previous novel The Sundial, the tale of a monstrous family in another eerie house, it has as jarring a finale as anything she wrote.
--Marshal Zeringue
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