“There was something sick in that house … if you scratched the walls of Heatherbrae house, scoring the handblocked peacock wallpaper with your nails, or gouging the polished granite tiles … darkness would seep out.”

That’s a creepy passage from Ruth Ware’s evocatively titled novel, “The Turn of the Key,” which enters the list at No. 3. It’s a murder mystery set at a meticulously restored Victorian manor house in the Scottish Highlands, where the smart technology has a mind of its own: Lights turn on, doors close and music blares, often in the dead of night. “Whether Heatherbrae is haunted or not (and you’ll have to make up your own mind on that), I love a good haunted house story,” Ware writes on her website, going on to list five favorites: Susan Hill’s “The Woman in Black,” Stephen King’s “The Shining,” Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” Sarah Waters’s “The Little Stranger” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” which she calls “truly terrifying.”

She isn’t the only one: Numerous writers have cited it as the scariest book they’ve ever read, including Neil Gaiman, who told The Times last year, “A maleficent house, real human protagonists, everything half-seen or happening in the dark. ... It scared me as a teenager and it haunts me still.” In “Danse Macabre,” his book on the horror genre, Stephen King said “Hill House” was one of “the only two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years” (the other was “The Turn of the Screw”).

[ Neil Gaiman, Carmen Maria Machado, Dan Simmons and more talk about the books that terrify them most. ]