Let Hill House Haunt Your Dreams Tonight
I would burn down my house if there was a spider in it, let alone a ghost.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.
We have long established that despite my love for horror books, I’m still a wuss and have never watched a horror movie of any kind. So it should come as no surprise that I’ve also never been to a haunted house or any sort of creepy Halloween-themed event. In the event I get jump-scared, I feel like my instinctive reaction would be to hit the other person so for everyone’s safety, I think it’s best I don’t go.
However, it doesn’t seem that Eleanor Vance has the same preservation skills as me as we find out in The Haunting of Hill House, otherwise known as one of the best haunted house stories of all time.
At the behest of Dr Montague, who is looking to understand the ghostly phenomena happening in Hill House, Eleanor and a small selection of other guests make their way to the house, where they expect to stay for the summer. However, within days of them arriving at Hill House, they start to experience unexplainable events where they are seemingly purposefully isolated from each other, with property being damaged. As time goes on, Eleanor has a growing suspicion that these hauntings are the other guests playing a trick on her.
The Haunting of Hill House exceeded all of my expectations and I feel like I can see why this book is so beloved. I did pick it up some time ago while casually browsing in the library, and read the first few pages of it; I didn’t get the chance to finish it, but what little I saw stayed with me for months until I read it in its entirety.
What I really loved about this book is how terrorising everything felt. In some of the other horror books we’ve reviewed here, I think there has been some reliance on gore to give you that “urgh” feeling. And while gore definitely has its place in the horror genre, it was really refreshing to read a book that made me quake in fear without needing to read about mutilation or the like.
Eleanor being an unreliable narrator also contributed to the book’s terrifying atmosphere; there were parts I thought whatever was happening had to be in her head because how else could everyone stay so calm while the world was all but ending?
But there is one thing that I’m on the fence about, and that was the ending of the novel. While I felt that Eleanor’s arc was very nicely bookended, some part of me wishes it had ended just a little differently since everything was tied up so nicely. And isn’t that a wild complaint?
“I have a hunch,” she said, “that you ought to go home, Eleanor.”
You can take my one peeve with a pinch of salt as this book scared me so bad that the day after I finished it, I jumped when the walls of a meeting room I was in shook from somebody opening the door. For one second, I thought I was in Hill House myself.
So in these last few days of October, The Haunting of Hill House is definitely a novel horror fans should read, especially those who had said they were looking to explore the gothic horror genre more.
Rating: 4.5/5
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson was released in 1959 and published by Viking.