Welcome to Hill House

http://looneybooks79.blog/2025/10/17/the-haunting-of-hill-house/

Let me begin by saying that I read it a first time 21 years ago but I didn't remember a lot so it wasn't a bad idea to reread it. It is one of those novels that is considered a classic gothic horror novel, although it was written after the real hype of the genre had already passed. Books like Dracula, Frankenstein or stories written by Poe or Lovecraft set the tone for this genre. And although this novel was written in 1959, it could easily be considered to be a great horror story. And yet...

“The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.”

Unlike parts of Frankenstein or most of Dracula, this is not written as an epistolary novel. This is a tale about a woman, Eleanor Vance, who has taken care of her mother for almost eleven years and now has to move out of her little apartment, leave her car and all her belongings because her sister and her brother in law are taking possession of everything. But Eleanor gets a chance to start a new life. She is a very fragile woman and when she gets the chance to go to Hill House, she steals the car and sets on with all the remainder of her belongings. Dr. Montague invited her to Hill House to stay there for a few days, together with the enigmatic Theodora and Luke Sanderson, the cousin of the current owner of the mansion. He is to become to future inheritor of the building. It is Dr. Montague's investigation into paranormal and supernatural occurrences that led him and his three compagnons to Hill House.

During their stay the group is haunted by noises, cold drafts, doors closing and a mansion that is so twisted and curved you could easily get lost in the corridors, opening dozens of doors and not yet reach the place you want to be. The caretakers, the Dudleys, are a weird couple that add to the strangeness of the entire house. Theodora and Eleanor become really close, especially Eleanor is happy to finally be among people she might consider friends, even after only a day or so. But it is also Eleanor who is most receptive to the phenomena in the house. And when the house itself calls to Eleanor to come home, the group will have to be very vigilant no one is taken by the ghosts living in the house.

"Some houses are born bad!"

I was really happy when this book was picked for the month of October. As I mentioned, it had been a real long time since I've read it. And I had seen a few adaptations of it (recently the Mike Flanagan miniseries which I highly recommend) but the book in itself is still different than any of the adaptations.

It may be considered as a horror story, about a haunted house. But in itself nothing much happens in the story that can be considered scary or really creepy. There is loud banging on doors, there's a cold draft in some places, there's the house that is eerie and very off-putting but all of this is told in Jackson's 'matter-of-fact' writing. She leaves most to your own imagination. And if that imagination is very vivid, you will see things in the novel, in the house, that make your hair on your arms rise up. If you don't have a very vivid imagination, it could be you'll be let down by this story a little bit. Lucky for me, I do have a vivid imagination, I do love a good ghost story and I liked this one very much. But perhaps it is because of the movie adaptations I have seen, or perhaps because I have read a few other stories about haunted houses (hotels) and this one feels like having set the bar for those other books. I wonder if there would have been a book called 'The Shining' without this one? (I'm not saying King wrote The Shining because he read this book, but I do think it did inspire him for that story as will have many other writers...)

The Haunting of Hill House is a very atmospheric, gothic tale about people making connection in the most dire situation. It's about a woman looking for her place in the world, only to find it in the most peculiar place. It's also about a legacy, about storytelling and about believability.

I do admire Jackson's writing. It is not too thick with long hard sentences, a clear and vivid language. And while she leaves a lot to your own imagination, her writing, her imagery, offers a perfect picture of what the house and the surroundings look like. If you love Shirley Jackson, you will definitely love Susan Hill as well. (The Woman in Black, The Man in the Picture, The Small Hand, Dolly...)

Take my hand and join me into the labyrinth that is 'Hill House'!

A little note on the edition I bought. This is one of a series of horror novels and collections of stories that Guillermo del Toro (a famous Mexican director who made The Devil's Backbone, Crimson Peak, two Hellboy movies and most recently Frankenstein). In 2013 he collected six (gothic horror) stories and Penguin Random House turned these into these beautiful editions, each a different colour. Guillermo del Toro provides a foreword and a reason why he picked these six stories. The Haunting of Hill House also has a foreword by Laura Miller, who is a journalist and author herself. She mentions two adaptations of this novel in her foreword, saying the 1999 version was atrocious. I honestly don't agree with that. But maybe that's because I saw that movie when it was released in 1999. I rewatched it recently and honestly, I think it stands the time pretty well. But apparently not everyone thinks the same... (lucky for us, we can all differ in opinion.