Dr Montague, a scientific investigator of ghostly phenomena, has chosen to live for several weeks at Hill House, by repute a place of horror that will brook no human habitation. To check and contribute to his observations, he selects three companions previously unknown to him; two girls, Theo and Eleanor, and Luke, a young man, who is heir to Hill House. What happens cannot, in fairness, be told. But Dr Montague’s words were prophetic: ‘A ghost cannot hurt anyone; only the fear of ghosts can be dangerous.’ Whether the ghosts at Hill House caused the fear, or the fear created the ghosts, there were such manifestations as to produce, finally, an ultimate terror that was all too palpable and down-to-earth.

The Haunting Of Hill House‘ was as engaging as it was disturbing. I loved it. The prose was wonderful. The story was disturbing. Eleanor, the main character, was a masterful creation. The ending was perfect. It doesn’t get better than this.

I’m new to Shirely Jackspn’s books. Yeah, I know, she’s so revered her name is on annual awards given to best horror novels but I hadn’t read anything of hers until last year when I read her collection of disturbing stories, ‘Dark Tales‘. I loved her writing so I promised myself I’d read her most famous book, ‘The Haunting Of Hill House‘ for the 2024 Halloween Bingo.

One of the best things about ‘The Haunting Of Hill House‘ was Shirley Jackson’s writing. Her prose was a joy to read: accessible, vivid but also quietly disturbing. She hooked my imagination completely with her description of impressionable Eleano’rs first view of the allegedly haunted Hill House:

“No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice. Almost any house, caught unexpectedly or at an odd angle, can turn a deeply humorous look on a watching person; even a mischievous little chimney, or a dormer like a dimple, can catch up a beholder with a sense of fellowship; but a house arrogant and hating, never off guard, can only be evil.”

After that introduction to the house as evil, I settled into the book, expecting the house to become more frightening with each chapter. My anxiety rose and rose in the first half of the book but it wasn’t Hill House with its strange angles and persistent shadows and self-closing doors that disturbed me. It was Eleanor. She was so vulnerable and what she wanted from life was so simple but, to me,, she felt shrouded in doom, Eleanor was without malice. She wanted only acceptance, belonging, an absence of disapproval, the presence of colour, a little joy. Yet, bit by bit, I felt her slipping into shadow.

What makes this book disturbing and sets it apart is how skillfully Shirely Jackson braids anxiety and ambiguity to create an ever-increasing sense of non-specific wrongness. The kind of thing that makes you need to run away but leaves you unable to explain that need convincingly to yourself or others. I loved that, as Shirlely Jackson’s subtle, layered prose pushed up my sense of foreboding, she also changed it’s focus making me ‘afraid for’ Eleanor rather than ‘afraid of’ Hill House.

When, in the final third of the book, the haunting of Hill House starts to manifest, the ambiguity increases rather than lessens. It could be that Hill House is hauntiny Eleanor. It could also be that Eleanor is haunting Hill House.

 Either way, as the hostile nature of Hill House manifests, Eleanor, vulnerable, happiness-seeking Eleanor, who yearns to be an insider, to belong, finds herself claimed by Hill House and marked as an outsider, a scapegoat, by her companions. It is deliberately unclear whether Eleanor either sees people too clearly to be on the inside or is so paranoid and isolated that she walls herself off from the people around her.

Then things slowly change as Eleanor starts to behave as if she is the one haunting Hill House or at least as if she and the house are real and everyone else is the other side of some impermeable barrier. I was impressed at how Shirley Jackson made Eleanor’s view seem if not rational, then at least relatable while at the same time letting the reader see what Eleanor is not, that Eleanor is slowly unravelling.

The ending caught me by surprise. It was also perfect. After I read it, I found myself going back over Eleanor’s actions to see if this ending had always been inevitable, even though I hadn’t seen it coming.

I realised that Eleanor had been fantasising about Hill House and what her time in it would mean for her since before she had her first glimpse of it. She was looking for something new, something NOW, in her life. In her head, the half-articulated desires that brought her to Hill House became entangled with the lyrics of the Fool’s song from ‘Twelth Night’. She repeats the phrase “Journey’s end with lovers meeting'” many times as a sort of shorthand for her own hopes and desires and she pushes herself to act on those desires by quoting:

What is love, 'tis not hereafter, 
Present mirth, hath present laughter:
       What's to come, is still unsure. 
In delay there lies no plenty,"

It seemed to me that at first, Eleanor was open-minded and hopeful about what ‘journey’s end with lovers meeting’ might mean. It could have been about her meeting the handsome if unreliable Luke or the charismatic Theodore. They were the most likely candidates to off her ‘present mirth’ and ‘present laughter’. Then, as her hope in each of them fades, Eleanor increasingly sees Hill House itself as the lover at her journey’s end, Which, I think, is what makes the ending so perfect.