1. Marianne Dreams - Catherine Storr
First published back in the 1950s, the book has aged incredibly well and has continued to scare the pants off children and adults from 1958 up to the present day. I read it when I was about eleven years old and I can testify that the book is even more freaky than the movie adaptation - Paperhouse - that came out in the 1980s - and that film was so scary it had a 15 certificate! Marianne is a young girl who is bed bound by an illness for a prolonged period of time. She draws a picture of a house and has elaborate dreams and fantasies about her drawing, to which she keeps adding embellishments. Eventually she crosses things out in the drawing and this leads to trouble. Marianne, through her dreams, meets a boy called Mark who is seriously debilitated in the real world. Will she be able to sort out her fantasy world and make it through her illness? An extremely original novel, Catherine Storr manages to create a dystopian fantasy world for Marianne, which is not just scary for our heroine but also pretty darn scary for the reader - adult or child. The giant sentient stones outside her imaginary house are the scariest thing in the book. After all of these years, that is the part of the book that has stayed with me. I think it is an amazingly simple idea - a drawing comes to life in dreams - but it is handled in an expert way by Storr. You can empathise with Marianne's frustration over her slow recovery and her anger at her illness. The book is much more affecting and chilling for children than most of the horror books pitched at them these days. It is very readable and gets under the skin. A perfect horror book for kids and so well written with a unique concept that adults will enjoy it as well.