Even though most of Joan Samson's novel The Auctioneer takes place during the three seasons of the year that aren't winter, it possesses a bleak and chilly atmosphere that might as well be the coldest day in January.
“...that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay.”
Ancestral homes often have a habit of feeling haunted, and when they appear in stories that mix the Southern Gothic genre with the supernatural, you can bet they probably are.
You might not expect a novel about killer plants to be thoroughly lacking in over-the-top corniness, but John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids handily pulls it off.