Dracula

It starts small and ordinary: a young solicitor sent abroad on a property matter, writing everything down the way careful people do. The castle he stays in is grand and oddly empty, and his host is charming in a way that never quite settles. By the time the letters stop feeling normal, he's a long way from anywhere that can help him.

The fear here creeps rather than jumps. It's built from small wrongnesses noticed too late, from journals and letters that don't agree with each other, and from a sense that something old and patient has already worked out how to get where it's going. Whitby's fog does a lot of the heavy lifting.

Good for a night when you want dread rather than gore, told in fragments the way a proper mystery ought to be. It suits reading alone, with something warm in your hands and the curtains shut.

Told through letters, diary entries and newspaper cuttings rather than one straight narrator, which makes the whole thing feel like evidence rather than a story.