The Haunting of Hill House

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 show more 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

This is simply great writing. I have not read such vivid descriptions of lonely lives since the best of Richard Yates. And Jackson's prose walks (and sometimes cartwheels) on that thin membrane between outer and inner lives (is Eleanor in the house, or is the house in Eleanor?) She captures characters in a few brushstrokes and fills it in with dialogue. She subtly makes the reader aware of all that is NOT being said, NOT being done. This is spooky stuff, for sure...all the more for being so life-like. Now I see why it's a classic. Don't stop with The Lottery, go on to read this one and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

he 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 show more 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. show less

I've long heard about this being a classic in the horror genre and have wondered what makes it so. Given it's 1959 pedigree, I had some suspicions and those have been borne out: less Stephen King, more Blair Witch Project. The goal here is to build atmosphere and then stew in it. It uses first-person narration to lock us into one person's perspective and thoughts, and then progressively wears that person down and consequently (one hopes, to be effective) the reader as well.

Jackson does some wonderful setting up of the house's aura, introducing it through Eleanor's eyes. Eleanor is able to invent all sorts of fun, fanciful imaginings about various other sites enroute to her destination, even some run-down ruinous ones or a field of show more poisonous oleanders, but she is completely stopped by the sight of the house. Jackson further creates atmosphere with her refusal to describe the house's appearance in detail, given us nothing we can use to dismiss it with.

When Eleanor and company are making fun of the grim house and its caretakers, it's exactly as I would like to do in their place, the strongest tool for combatting fear. But Jackson preserves the atmosphere against which they are struggling, and their struggle emphasizes it. Try as they might to make light of the situation, the house persists. The laughter fades and the house remains as it was. Jackson subtly employs personification with a claustrophobic edge: the house closes itself around them, closes in on them, closes its doors behind them, closes its blinds. It won't let them leave. At first you can believe the fastidious caretaker is responsible, but that excuse begins to pale. The actual events of horror that do occur are relatively tame, taken individually, but lend themselves to the atmosphere's construction: each of them is just out of sight, just a bit inaudible, unseen by the narrator, lacking a detailed description. You need to fill in the blanks yourself - and once you start filling in those blanks, Jackson has made you her ally and pulled you into her web. Into the house. show less

I recall being in college and seeing "The Haunting (1999)" which was a movie based on this book. A bunch of friends and I watched this movie in one of the dorm rooms and I swear at one point I was firmly wedged beneath my poor friend trying my best to use her as a shield (yes she totally forgave me for yanking and hiding underneath her).

I honestly at the time had no clue that movie was based upon that book. I do remember being scared during and after the movie (slept with my light on that night) and wondered why movies and books based on haunted houses always scared me the most. It could be because your home is supposed to be your safe place and you feel loved and protected there. When writers start to pick away at that sense of safety show more and security you start to feel more vulnerable. It could also be why people never seem to think that they can be mugged or assaulted in the daylight. In our minds only horrible things happen at night, good things happen in the day.

I have never read Shirley Jackson before and I have to say that I am just really impressed. She manages to imbue such life into all of the characters in this book, especially Eleanor.

There are four main characters that we follow in this story. First, Dr. John Montague who investigates the paranormal. Second, Eleanor Vance, who we find out was forced to take care of her sick mother until she finally passed away. Third, Theodora, who the story leads us to believe may possibly be gay. Fourth, Luke Sanderson, who is the heir to Hill House.

Told in the third person I found that Eleanor more than any other character is meant to be the stand in for the reader. When she was scared, I was scared, when she started to feel panicky I did as well. I think towards the end I must have said "Girl, you need to run" at least ten times. I was sitting and reading this book on my book patio on a bright and sunny day and I felt cold and scared thinking of what the end of this book would bring.I wanted everyone to be safe and to live Hill House together. Instead I started to feel that no matter how much I wished for a happy ending, Shirley Jackson was not going to be providing one.

This book in a word was perfect. Everything worked and Shirley Jackson keeps up your unending sense of dread while you are reading this book. When the band of four start investigating the house and you read how it was built you start to imagine a slightly off house in your head as they go exploring. I seriously wish someone had made a map of the house since it was so confusing trying to understand where rooms were located. Having the little foursome start to turn on each other and then become afraid together and alone was actually more frightening than whatever was going on in Hill House.

One of my favorite passages was this said by Eleanor to the group:

"I am always afraid of being alone," Eleanor said, and wondered, Am I talking like this? Am I saying something that I will regret bitterly tomorrow? Am I making more guilt for myself?

"Those letters spelled out my name, and none of you know what that feels like--it's so familiar."

And she gestured to them, almost in appeal. "Try to see," she said. It's my own dear name, and it belongs to me, and something is using it and writing it and calling me with it and my own name..."

She stopped and said, looking from one of them to another, even down onto Theodora's face looking up at her, "Look. There's only one of me, and it's all I've got. I hate seeing myself dissolve and slip and separate so that I'm living in one half, my mind, and I see the other half of me helpless and frantic and driven and I can't stop it, but I know I'm not really going to be hurt and yet time is so long and even a second goes on and on and I could stand any of it if I could only surrender--"

I would definitely recommend to those looking for a scary book to read in October. show less

http://tinyurl.com/y8zke8r2

I love it when I get to read a classic that wasn't on my radar and was written in a style that I could appreciate and engage with. Did I say engage? Oh, sorry, I meant was completely creeped out by.

I spent the entire evening after finishing this short novel walking around the house shaking my hands and going "ew, ew, ew". Now, you'll think that's because - as a novel set squarely in the horror genre - there's a ton of gore and sudden scary moments that make you jump out of your skin. Not in the slightest. It's creepy without having to resort to any of that.

Yes, there are plenty of spine-tingling chills and odd sudden unveilings. But the strength of the novel is in the depiction of its characters and their show more psychologies. You spend the entire novel specifically in the head of one of the characters - learning her thoughts, worries, and revelations. So, frankly, you learn her psychology and what she thinks and feels about the others' psychologies. It's a brilliant depiction of someone not completely... put together. And both her effect on the others around her, as well as the effect of the setting on her.

I strongly recommend this to anyone, especially in advance of the Netflix series coming out. It's worth reading Jackson's story beforehand. (I have some high hopes for this as a series because there is a lot they can delve into here, not just one particular character from the novel.) show less

i just really, really love this book. i'm starting to realize that maybe all the ways that i want to interpret this or read this might not quite work (maybe, maybe) and that some of the ideas i have about it or the things that i tend to fixate on might not even make sense when all taken together. but also i'm continuing to see that as the beauty and strength of this book, because it constantly keeps you guessing and changing your mind and reevaluating and wondering.

deep sigh. i love this so much. (5 stars)

from sept 2022:

i am never going to stop rereading this book. it's different every time; i see more every time; i see it differently every time; i love it just as much or more every time. so brilliant.

i tried to specifically pay show more attention to things like the time lapses, eleanor's psychology, and a few parts i wasn't sure i fully understood before. i came away thinking that the time can be followed more than i thought, although if you're not really tracking it, i'm not sure it wouldn't make you feel off-kilter, like the house itself. (it is rather hard to believe how much happens in the space of a week, which is all the time we have at hill house.)

i had a harder time than usual, at least through the second third of the book, feeling like eleanor could have been responsible for everything. it felt more like a haunting during that phase of the book, but before and after i felt like it all could have been her. (i usually want it to be all in her head, but i'm not sure that mrs montague's planchette works if it's in her head.)

i also continue to want so badly to hear more from theo, and this time to have read dr montague's paper on what they saw at hill house. but, i know, that knowing how accurate eleanor's narration is would ruin it, to some extent. i just so want to know.

i forget, somehow, how funny this book is in parts. by the time mrs montague comes it feels so late in the book, and her presence is such a comic relief after all the tension that has come before. it's such a stark contrast, and so perfect a reflection. i found, in this reading, more of an understanding of each character's feeling of belonging (or their attempt to capture that feeling) - even mrs montague. each of them, really, in their own way, belongs here more than anywhere else. this, to me, is more evidence of theo's queerness, which i know isn't always accepted as obvious, but that i think is.

good god i love this book so much. (5 stars)

from dec 2020: 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 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