I Am Legend

Richard Matheson's novel imagines a world brought to its knees by a disease that has turned almost everyone into something monstrous and vampiric, leaving very little of the old world standing. It's the sort of horror that gets its teeth into you not through folklore or superstition, but through a cold, reasoned explanation for what has happened, which somehow makes it all the more unsettling.

This is the book that quietly shaped decades of vampire and zombie fiction that came after it, so if you've ever watched something with a plague turning people into monsters and thought it felt familiar, this is very likely where that feeling started.

It suits readers who like their horror slow and thoughtful rather than full of gore, and it's best kept for a properly dark, quiet evening. Curtains shut, one lamp lit, phone face down. This rewards being read in one sitting if you can manage it, since the isolation only grows heavier the further in you get, and the reasoning behind it all just makes it worse.