It's been a while since a horror novel really creeped me out, but John Rector's The Grove pulled off the trick. A spare novel, The Grove is the story of Dexter McCray, a man suffering from some sort of psychological illness (never identified). Before the novel starts, Dexter has been off his meds for a while, because the world is a grayer place without them.
When he finds a dead body on his property, it kicks his neurosis into high gear, and he starts imagining the dead girl as a vengeful ghost, trying to use him to find justice for herself. Even though Dexter knows she's a figment of his imagination, he'd rather have her near him than lose her by taking his pills.
Dexter is a man living on a knife-edge of sanity, and watching him try to walk it like a tight-rope was a nerve-wracking experience. At every moment, we worry that Dexter will do something violent, either to himself or others as he hunts for the girl's killer. The ghost's appearances start out fairly benignly (to the extent that such a delusion can be benign), but quickly turn into a voice for Dexter's darker side -- her metamorphosis is very creepy, and makes this on of the great psychological horror novels.
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