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, stood 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.

“I’ll bet I’m roughly as afraid of glass as is appropriate, as afraid of glass as a reasonable adult needs to be,” I’d have said before I’d read Jamaican-born Nalo Hopkinson’s “Under Glass” in her 2001 short story collection Skin Folk, in which a girl tries to outrun a glass-bearing windstorm before being flayed alive. I don’t say that any more. These eerie Caribbean folklore-inflected stories run from a version of “Little Red Riding Hood” through the tale of a terrifyingly outsize cockatrice to a post-apocalyptic world blighted by glass storms.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in the 1973 film Don’t Look Now. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features

The short story lends itself to horror at least in part because both require an economy of detail.. Slowly, Slowly in the Wind is a late-ish Patricia Highsmith collection, published in 1979, and while it’s a little uneven (the work of a miserable mid-century alcoholic 30 years into her career), nasty little treasures such as “Those Awful Dawns” make the journey worth it. This tale is a loosely reworked urban legend – bad, drug-addled parents; an open medicine cabinet; some unloved, curious children – in which dreadful but comic circumstances roll relentlessly downhill.

Mary Shelley wrote Matilda in 1819-20, while on “the hearth of pale despair” after the deaths of her two young children. A young woman on her deathbed recalls the events that led to her father’s suicide, her own failing health and the blighting of all her hopes. With Frankenstein, Matilda and The Last Man, Shelley cornered the market in feverish meditations on choked-off isolation. Her father, William Godwin, found its incest themes “detestable” when she sent him Matilda to submit for publication. He never returned it to her, and it was published for the first time in 1959. It is brief and thudding, wonderfully frightening, and over almost before the first shock of discovery has worn off.

'Textbook terror': How The Haunting of Hill House rewrote horror's rules Read more

I’m still terrified by Donald Sutherland’s expression on the poster for the film adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now”, originally from her 1971 collection Not After Midnight. As a whole, the collection isn’t any scarier than Rebecca or even Jamaica Inn, but it has got proper ghosts in it. The narrator of the titular story tries to tease out whether his compulsive drinking can be blamed on supernatural causes: “My complaint is universal, and has been so through the ages, an excuse for jest and hilarious laughter from earliest times, until one of us oversteps the mark and becomes a menace to society. Then we are given the boot. The passerby averts his gaze, and we are left to crawl out of the ditch alone, or stay there and die.” Maybe it does edge out Jamaica Inn, after all.

• Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror is published by Corsair. To order a copy for £11.17 (RRP £12.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.