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Loading... The Haunting of Hill House (Penguin Classics)by Shirley Jackson
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. One of my all time favorite movies are those based on this novel. I believe there is an old black and white movie of the same name and the more lavish production in which Liam Neeson starred.Both movies are terrific on their own. Good stories and great acting.The novel gave me what both movies lacked, though: insight to the mind of Eleanor Vance.Spoiler PointEleanor is a sympathetic and fascinating character. Having spent eleven years catering to the needs of a demanding and selfish mother, after her mother's death she finds a way out of her dead-end life in an invitation to Hill House.Desperate to belong and to have a place of beauty to live, she at first enjoys the company of Luke, Theodora, and the Doctor. As time goes on and strange things begin to happen, the influences of the house and its mystery begin to fully unravel Eleanor's mind. Her opinion, once positive of her house companions, turns to outright loathing. She never gives any outward sign of this, though.What we, the reader, don't truly realise until the tragic ending is that Eleanor was mad before coming to the house. Hill House only served to be the catalyst that finally unhinged her.When I finally put the book down, I was left to wonder if the haunting of Hill House had all been in Eleanor's mind.A great book. (  ) jaynedArcy | Dec 29, 2009 |  One of my all time favorite movies are those based on this novel. I believe there is an old black and white movie of the same name and the more lavish production in which Liam Neeson starred.Both movies are terrific on their own. Good stories and great acting.The novel gave me what both movies lacked, though: insight to the mind of Eleanor Vance.Spoiler PointEleanor is a sympathetic and fascinating character. Having spent eleven years catering to the needs of a demanding and selfish mother, after her mother's death she finds a way out of her dead-end life in an invitation to Hill House.Desperate to belong and to have a place of beauty to live, she at first enjoys the company of Luke, Theodora, and the Doctor. As time goes on and strange things begin to happen, the influences of the house and its mystery begin to fully unravel Eleanor's mind. Her opinion, once positive of her house companions, turns to outright loathing. She never gives any outward sign of this, though.What we, the reader, don't truly realise until the tragic ending is that Eleanor was mad before coming to the house. Hill House only served to be the catalyst that finally unhinged her.When I finally put the book down, I was left to wonder if the haunting of Hill House had all been in Eleanor's mind.A great book. ( ) jaynedArcy | Dec 29, 2009 | One of my all time favorite movies are those based on this novel. I believe there is an old black and white movie of the same name and the more lavish production in which Liam Neeson starred.Both movies are terrific on their own. Good stories and great acting.The novel gave me what both movies lacked, though: insight to the mind of Eleanor Vance.Spoiler PointEleanor is a sympathetic and fascinating character. Having spent eleven years catering to the needs of a demanding and selfish mother, after her mother's death she finds a way out of her dead-end life in an invitation to Hill House.Desperate to belong and to have a place of beauty to live, she at first enjoys the company of Luke, Theodora, and the Doctor. As time goes on and strange things begin to happen, the influences of the house and its mystery begin to fully unravel Eleanor's mind. Her opinion, once positive of her house companions, turns to outright loathing. She never gives any outward sign of this, though.What we, the reader, don't truly realise until the tragic ending is that Eleanor was mad before coming to the house. Hill House only served to be the catalyst that finally unhinged her.When I finally put the book down, I was left to wonder if the haunting of Hill House had all been in Eleanor's mind.A great book. ( ) jaynedArcy | Dec 29, 2009 | I had been waiting to read this book for a long time, and perhaps the anticipation was impossible to live up to. But this short novel, a haunted house story where four unlikeable people come together to "examine" and study the phenomena at Hill House (though, as a latecoming character correctly observes, little in the way of science and preparation seems to be actually done), lacked interest really from start to finish. One pities the primary character, but does not like her; three of the four have wild mood swings and engage in petty nastiness. The hauntings themselves are, to a modern reader, humdrum and intermittent - the book lacks drama and punch. (  )1  freddlerabbit | Dec 27, 2009 | Don't be turned off by the terrible movie that was made a few years ago. This is a genuinely scary little tale. It's a ghost story without gore or overt violence that left me unable to sleep. ( ) luccijude | Nov 28, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
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Eleanor Vance has always been a loner--shy, vulnerable, and bitterly resentful of the 11 years she lost while nursing her dying mother. "She had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it was difficult for her to talk, even casually, to another person without self-consciousness and an awkward inability to find words." Eleanor has always sensed that one day something big would happen, and one day it does. She receives an unusual invitation from Dr. John Montague, a man fascinated by "supernatural manifestations." He organizes a ghost watch, inviting people who have been touched by otherworldly events. A paranormal incident from Eleanor's childhood qualifies her to be a part of Montague's bizarre study--along with headstrong Theodora, his assistant, and Luke, a well-to-do aristocrat. They meet at Hill House--a notorious estate in New England.
Hill House is a foreboding structure of towers, buttresses, Gothic spires, gargoyles, strange angles, and rooms within rooms--a place "without kindness, never meant to be lived in...."
Although Eleanor's initial reaction is to flee, the house has a mesmerizing effect, and she begins to feel a strange kind of bliss that entices her to stay. Eleanor is a magnet for the supernatural--she hears deathly wails, feels terrible chills, and sees ghostly apparitions. Once again she feels isolated and alone--neither Theo nor Luke attract so much eerie company. But the physical horror of Hill House is always subtle; more disturbing is the emotional torment Eleanor endures. Intense, literary, and harrowing, The Haunting of Hill House belongs in the same dark league as Henry James's classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw. --Naomi Gesinger
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:03 -0400)
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