Review: The Haunting of Hill House

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“We couldn't even hear you, in the night....
No one could. No one lives any nearer than town. No one else will come any nearer than that.”

I’m not sure what I was expecting from The Haunting of Hill House. Or rather, I thought I knew what I was expecting, but wasn’t sure. Which is slightly different. It’s a horror story, right? It’s about a haunted house - it says so in the title. The book has been on my to-read list for perhaps longer than any other, since I was a teenager and read Stephen King’s Danse Macabre when it was first issued in paperback. King loved Hill House. It is all over Danse Macabre. But it was out of print in UK until 2009. Still, that is almost ten years ago and, still, I didn’t read it.
So, it being Hallowe’en, and with the new adaptation on Netflix (which, it turns out is excellent, but is not an adaptation, rather a reimagining), I decided it was time to read this really scary ghost story. And it is really scary, but is it a ghost story? Is Hill House haunted?
The writing is excellent, the prose lyrical (The opening and closing paragraphs are rightly lauded as classics but there are many similar passages). The dialogue is perhaps a little old-fashioned but it was written 60 years ago and it fits the gothic storytelling. Yet, on finishing the novel I was slightly disappointed. There are certainly some moments which make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck (“God! Whose hand was I holding?”) but there are so many conversations in the book about being scared, about the nature of being scared, almost looking forward to being scared. The writing is excellent though and so I gave it four stars.
And, yet. In the days since I finished the book, images and scenes have stayed with me. I am ‘haunted’ by some of the imagery and find myself replaying some of the key scenes in my head.

“Fear," the doctor said, "is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.” 

The characters surrender themselves willingly to the idea of being scared, in the same way as many of us do when reading horror fiction or watching a scary movie. And, whether there is something in Hill House which takes advantage of that, or whether it is something within the characters which tip them, particularly Eleanor, into madness, I am still unsure. And the genius of Shirley Jackson is that, two weeks later, I am still thinking about it.


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