Location, location, location: supposedly the three most important things in property – but what about books? More often described as plot- or character-driven, some books are memorable for their amazingly vivid and atmospheric locations; the setting may become so significant that it is almost one of the characters.

There is a wealth of books set in creepy or exotic locations, but I have tried to select 10 titles for which the setting, strikingly brought to life, is an integral and memorable element of the book's power.

1. Titus Groan, from The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake

It is hard to imagine a list of atmospheric settings which does not include this one. Gormenghast Castle is a vast, sprawling and dilapidated stone stronghold, topped by the Tower of Flints, which "patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven". The life of the inhabitants, circumscribed by ancient and pointless rituals, is as Gothic as the setting.

2. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Cold, leaky, dimly-lit and taken on a forty-year lease, the eponymous castle is "really rather romantic", as heroine and narrator Cassandra Mortmain describes it, but equally, "an unreasonable place to live in". It is a mixture of residential privation and unexpected beauty – drips caught in saucepans and sunlight shining through mullioned windows. So intriguing is it, that visiting Americans Simon and Neil Cotton cannot resist coming in for a closer look – with interesting consequences.

3. Revolver by Marcus Sedgwick

Set in the Arctic Circle in 1910, Revolver's location is literally chilling. Fifteen-year-old Sig Andersson waits alone in a lonely cabin whose single room measures only twenty-four feet by twelve. Outside, the conditions are so cold that Sig's own father has frozen to death, out on the ice-covered lake. As Sig keeps vigil with the body, he suddenly hears a knock on the door…

4. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Set in a graveyard with a magnificent hilltop location overlooking the town, the tale of Bod, a living child adopted by ghosts and a vampire after the murder of his parents, has a location striking in its incongruity: the cute infant Bod practises his alphabet by picking out the letters on tombstones. But in spite of the numerous friendly ghosts, the graveyard is still a sinister place – who is the being who has been buried under the hill since before even the Celts were there?

5. Railsea by China Mieville

China Mieville's adult books include The City & The City, which is all about location – two cities alongside each other, whose inhabitants ignore each other studiously. Railsea, his young adult novel, is set in a stunningly-imagined derelict world where the earth is undermined by enormous mole-like creatures and criss-crossed with a network of metal and wooden rails. Along these rails travels hero Shamus Yes ap Soorap on the moletrain Medes, whose captain obsessively hunts a great mole in a parody of Moby Dick.

6. Northern Lights by Philip Pullman

The world of the His Dark Materials is memorable for its inhabitants – the animal daemons who accompany every human being, the armoured polar bears, the witches – but who can forget the Oxford of Northern Lights, with its gloomy halls, its open fires, gold plate and glowing naptha lamps?

7. Shipbreaker by Paulo Bacigalupi

The setting of Shipbreaker is not so much creepy as threatening. In a future where fossil fuels have run out and the rich sail about in super-fast clipper ships, the carcasses of oil tankers are mined for copper wiring and other useful parts by teenager scavengers. Hair clipped short to avoid it being caught in machinery, they wriggle through bakingly hot and grimy ducts full of asbestos fibres, loose wires and dead rats. Appallingly claustrophobic, this is one setting you won't forget in a hurry.

8. The Flowing Queen by Kai Meyer

Translated from the German, Kai Meyer's book is set in an alternate Venice besieged by an Egyptian Pharoah. Colourful descriptions abound of deserted and crumbling buildings overlooking emerald green canals inhabited by fearsomely fanged mermaids. A wealth of small detail – the odour of damp stone, the grating of claws on the paving stones – bring the city to vivid life.

9. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

A book that could not exist without its green and gold tropical location: a beautiful and bountiful island – cut off from the adult world – that could so easily be a paradise if order and co-operation could be maintained, and which swiftly descends into a barbaric hell. Richly and colourfully described – and deadly.

10. The Weirdstone of Brisigamen by Alan Garner

Set around Alderley Edge, the most memorable part of the book is the section set in the labyrinthine series of caverns and tunnels which the children and their dwarvish guides must negotiate to escape their monstrous pursuers. This is the book that has scarred generations of readers! Friends in their forties and fifties still speak with horrified relish of "that bit", where the children turn a hairpin corner in a tunnel so tight that they almost stick fast. Brrr.

• Demons of Ghent, the second book in Helen Grant's Forbidden Spaces trilogy, and sequel to Silent Saturday is out now!