Scary Books That Are Not Gory

Four people spend a summer in a house with a reputation, and one of them begins to belong to it. Almost nothing physical happens; the fear is entirely in what the house does to Eleanor's mind.

A governess becomes convinced that two children in her care are communicating with the dead. Whether the ghosts are real is unresolved on purpose, and it has kept readers up for a century.

One caveat: Victorian sentences. Short, but not quick.

A young lawyer settles the affairs of a dead widow in a house cut off by the tide, and sees a figure at the funeral. A traditional ghost story executed perfectly, and short enough to finish in a sitting.

Two sisters live alone in a village that hates them, six years after most of their family died at dinner. The menace is social rather than supernatural, and the last act is genuinely disturbing without being graphic.

A doctor becomes entangled with a declining family in a crumbling postwar English house. The horror accumulates so slowly that readers argue about where it started; there is no gore at all.

One caveat: Very slow by design.

A 1950s socialite travels to a decaying mansion in the Mexican countryside after a frantic letter from her cousin. Lush and strange, with body horror implied rather than shown until late.

One caveat: The last quarter turns grotesque, though not bloody.

A woman revisits the reality television show that filmed her sister's apparent possession. Possession or mental illness is never settled, and the fear comes from the family rather than the effects.

A bookseller's daughter is summoned to record the true history of a famously secretive novelist. Gothic in the old sense — secrets, houses, twins — and frightening only in patches, which suits a reader at the edge of the genre.