Shirley Jackson (1) (1916–1965)

there are so few books that are, or approach, utter perfection, but this is absolutely one of them. and the passage introducing eleanor is still my all-time favorite introduction of a character in all of literature. i love this book so much.

even the things that feel like maybe, possibly mistakes (slight, of course), in retrospect aren't, and are even brilliant. (she barely overuses the word "concrete" when referring to eleanor's thoughts, but actually how fitting and perfect is that? as show more eleanor tries to ground herself in reality, in the tangible now, as opposed to the pull hill house is having on her; she is striving (or is she?) to remain concrete.)

i tried, this time, to read it slowly, to see things i hadn't seen before or that i didn't remember. it ended up, it looks like, being the fastest i read it (in terms of days) but i did manage to look at it a bit differently. the time confusion, for example. it's always bothered me a bit that the timing of everything has seemed not quite right. now i think that's intentional. that jackson can't have us really feel discomfort with the darkness and unpredictability of hill house. that we can't really feel the unsettling feeling of the off angles and the unexpected views and the never-knowing-where-you-are-in-the-house feeling that the characters feel. but we can feel uncomfortable in time. we can be unsure if we're 3 days in or is it 2 or 4? just slightly off - enough to not question her when theo says it was the day before yesterday. but it wasn't the day before yesterday. so we're a little unsteady, just as they are in hill house. with everything else being so perfect in this book, this has to be on purpose, and it works. it really works; i've always been uncomfortable with the timing of all of it, and this explains it (and yes, excuses it).

i really saw, this time, how the house is coming out of its wait at the same time as eleanor starts to come apart. the "which-is-it" question - is the house sentient and coming for or drawing in eleanor or is eleanor going crazy - that i always felt was expertly written to be either, i now see was expertly written to be both. they are concurrent happenings, and they play off each other. each time i read this, the house seems more alive and more active and more purposeful. but eleanor doesn't really feel less like she's breaking apart. the two together work perfectly together.

as much as i love this book, i forget how funny it is in places. her writing is so precise and yet not at all clinical. so good. so perfect. i already can't wait to read it again. i will be looking for a class to take on this book so i can really dive deep. i love it so much.

the same lines as always, always jumped out at me, but i also noticed some new ones this time. in particular i like what she's doing here, at our first introduction to the room eleanor is assigned:

"Perhaps someone had once hoped to lighten the air of the blue room in Hill House with a dainty wallpaper, not seeing how such a hope would evaporate in Hill House, leaving only the faintest hint of its existence like an almost inaudible echo of sobbing far away."

(5 stars)

from oct 2018:

truly, i love this book. jackson is an absolute master. of language, of plotting, of characterization (i mean, mein gott, the character of mrs montague is utter perfection), of everything important and everything minor in a book. even that first chapter, which i used to not love, is showing itself as brilliant as well.

one of my favorite passages in all of literature is the beginning of the second chapter, the whole of which perfectly (i mean *perfectly*) sets us up to be in eleanor's head for the rest of the book. oh, how i wish we got some of theo's perspective sometimes. (but i know that would negate everything jackson did. still, i'm so damn curious.) but because we live with eleanor for the book, that introduction chapter to her is everything it needs to be, it's amazing. in terms of getting to the haunted house part, the book takes a bit to get going (if that is why someone is reading it), but we are in this chapter with eleanor and it's simply one of the best written ways to give a reader a character study (and plant ideas and themes that we'll see come up again later) that i've ever seen.

there were a couple of things that seemed not quite right to me on this reading - that theodora could just leave her business for a couple of months, on a whim; that they didn't just leave the house after some of what they experienced; that jackson left off the story a few times to jump forward a few hours leaving things not quite settled and the time passage not quite clear at first - which made it not quite perfect. but all tiny things compared to the rest, which really is flawless.

i love the interplay between the house drawing eleanor in and eleanor's descent into madness. i love waffling between what is happening (is it a haunting? is eleanor imagining it? is theo being mean or not?) page to page. i love wondering about the interpretation that we're given, as it's coming from the one person we can't really rely on. i love that jackson makes it possible that it's all in eleanor's head, or it's all the house taking her. i love i love i love i love.

oh how i love this book. (5 stars)

from oct 2016:

if i liked the first 2.5 pages of this better i don't know what i'd have to complain about. and i liked them more this time than i did at my first reading, so maybe i'll come completely around to them at some point. because this is obviously a book i will be reading again and again. i wish i could take a graduate class just on this book, there is so much in here and so much to discuss; the depths you can find about each of the characters and the history is ... well, it's exciting.

my interpretation of the book is completely different than last time with this reading. i didn't find this too scary last time (except that amazing scene where eleanor thinks she's holding theo's hand in the night through the noise and the cold and then finds theo was sleeping all along) but this time, i found it scary pretty much from beginning to end. part of that is knowing what is coming and seeing so much foreshadowing throughout, but most of that is reading it differently. it's one of my favorite things about this book, that it can be read in different ways, and the interpretations can all be backed up by the text. so this time i read it less as eleanor going crazy, and much more as the house is alive and wanted her, drew her in, and drove her actions. which makes for a different story and a pretty scary read, even though i don't usually prefer this kind of tale. it's just so expertly done.

i still absolutely love the way she begins chapter 2: "Eleanor Vance was thirty-two years old when she came to Hill House. The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends. This was owing largely to the eleven years she had spent caring for her invalid mother, which had left her with some proficiency as a nurse and an inability to face strong sunlight without blinking." i think it will prove to be one of my favorite passages in literature.

this time i found it clear that theodora is a lesbian; it didn't feel much like subtext but actually out in the open. maybe it's reading this directly after the education of harriet hatfield when they called their partners their friends, but seeing "friend" in this book didn't make me wonder what she meant like it did last time. the reference to the alfred de musset book (i'm assuming the erotic lesbian one) i think is supposed to make that clear. not that it matters, i just found it differently obvious in this reading.

there is so much creepy foreshadowing that i either didn't notice before or just, i don't know, shrugged off. of course, it totally can be shrugged off, since this book can perfectly be read in a number of ways. but this time, maybe i wanted to read it as a haunted house story, or maybe something early on just nudged me in that direction. because i must have marked 25 places (before i gave up) where the house "watches" "waits" "settles" "sighs" "steadied" that don't necessarily mean the house is alive, per say. but it sure felt like it was aware and sentient in this reading. maybe that's also partly prep for rereading white is for witching, in which the house is most definitely a character in the book. (there's even a line in here - "The sense was that [the house] wanted to consume us, take us into itself, make us a part of the house, maybe" that, to me, foreshadows the oyeyemi book in its entirety.) while i'm talking other books, i'll also say that the way the nursery was described, the coldness and as "the heart of the house" reminded me also of the den of it, in stephen king's it. not that they were trying to destroy anything in this house, though.

this is just so good. is the force inside her? did it draw her there? is it her, herself? "Eleanor, racing to the pounding, which seemed inside her head as much as in the hall, ..." ... "how can these others hear the noise when it is coming from inside my head? I am disappearing inch by inch into this house..." is she going crazy? is the house making her crazy? was she already crazy? i even found myself, at one point, asking, is she even actually there?? i can't say enough how much i love how answering those questions differently gives a completely different reading of the book. it's just so brilliantly done. i already can't wait to read it again one day. (5 stars)

from oct 2014:

oh this book is so, so good. i didn't love the first 2.5 pages, but by midway through page 3, when she opens chapter 2 with - "Eleanor Vance was thirty-two years old when she came to Hill House. The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends. This was owing largely to the eleven years she had spent caring for her invalid mother, which had left her with some proficiency as a nurse and an inability to face strong sunlight without blinking." - i was all in.

it's not as scary (in the traditional sense) as i'd expected, but i think it's stronger for it as it's less about the supernatural manifestations in the house and more about the expectation of them that build in the group and with each of the people individually. is the house evil? is anything happening or is it in the occupant's heads? (does mrs. montague not experience any phenomena because there aren't any or because she's not a part of the group the house has chosen?) is theodora mean to eleanor or is that (also?) in eleanor's head? at what point does eleanor really start to go mad, and how much of the story is then called into question because it's told from her point of view? there are so many questions that come up reading this; it's the kind of book that makes you want to go back through and find clues and see how things shift based on how you might answer those questions.

i love the uncertainty that comes with reading this and i understand why it's cited as foundational for so many writers (like stephen king). and yet it reads like it could have been published the day i began reading it.

i can't do this book justice. it's just so good on so many levels. shirley jackson can write and i can't wait to read (and reread over and over again) everything she ever published. (5 stars) show less

Shirley Jackson presents us with a mystery: why is this well-to-do family who've experienced a terrible tragedy so disliked by its surrounding community? Soon enough, the details begin to emerge: poison, accusations, a trial, and an unconvincing acquittal. Now the Blackwoods linger on like a shadow in the woods.

Uncle Julian, in his half bewildered state as he suffers from the after-effects of poisoning, daily reminds his two nieces of the details from that fateful day. Merricat seems show more unaffected - the source of her troubles predates the incident - but the impact on her sister Constance is more difficult to pinpoint. On the exterior she seems to be managing well, but there is a hidden longing to come out of the shell she was forced into. In the meantime she is very open to powers of suggestion, and Merricat does her best to monopolize this.

Their trauma and mental illness are never spelled out or mentioned. This may have been the central point of the story, a 1962 view of how such things were misunderstood and treated at the time, with insight into the minds and lives of the the disturbed who must live through the treatment they receive rather than receive the treatment they require. The novel's key plot point was spoiled for me, but I can't imagine not guessing it in advance with so many clues. It's a wonder that none of the villagers do.

Of late it seems Jackson's legacy is more noted for "Hill House", but this is the better of those two novels. show less

A grim piece of Americana, a folk horror minor masterpiece that channels Kafka and the American intellectual's fear of the boondocks. You keep asking yourself (her aim) 'why do they do this?' and the only answer seems to be 'because it has always been done this way'.

The lottery, of course, is not for something good and there are biblical echoes in what that thing is as well as hints that some people in other villages are thinking for themselves even though this particular village seems not show more to realise that this is a reasonable possibility.

The work scores not in the underlying idea (which is not remarkable) but in the way Jackson builds up the story through a picture of normalcy that may be conformity but is also the way of otherwise good people. We are directed to observe what sophisticated 'we' must call ignorance, even stupidity. show less

4.5 / 5

some of the prose in THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE is absolutely breathtaking. Jackson writes like a river, effortlessly slipping into Eleanor’s thoughts as the house starts to take its toll. i loved everything about Eleanor’s character - I thought she was sad, terribly lonely, and simultaneously bubbly and personable.

sure, the whole “is it a real ghost or is the main character going crazy” trope is well-done and beaten by now, but i actually thought this was a tour-de-force of show more this kind of narrative. it was scary in the right places, heartbreaking in others, and unsettling the whole way through.

i think the ghosts were real, but latching onto Eleanor for reasons we ~don’t really know~ (though we can probably guess it’s because of her heightened vulnerability). Eleanor seems like the perfect victim for the supernatural forces at play in Hill House. she has a dreamlike affect, often losing herself in long and winding imaginative creations, following daydream after daydream rather than existing in the present moment. her dreaminess makes her susceptible to being haunted - she’s already out of touch with reality.

Theo is very interesting - if we think about Luke as the more innocent, sort of clueless character, then Theo foils Luke (and mainly, Eleanor) as the sharp and stubborn, not always well-intentioned character. as women, Theo and Eleanor spiral around each other - they poke and prod at each other’s deepest wounds, and in Theo’s case it’s clear that this is intentional manipulation. she love-bombs Eleanor and then withholds affection, she casts accusations at Eleanor and tries to alienate her from the others, and she continually picks at Eleanor’s crumbling facade.

as for the question of gay - i DEFINITELY think Theo is queer-coded. Eleanor seems more desperate for attention and affirmation than desirous of a wlw dynamic with Theo.

the end is especially good - the first and last paragraphs of the book are fabulous, technically flawless, and iconic for good reason.

i knock off points because mrs. montague sucks, her dalliance with arthur is pointless, and dr. montague is as characterless as a piece of white paper. show less