The Haunting of Hill House

"Shirley Jackson came on the scene into a very male-dominated world of publishing. It took a while for women to get to write and to be published and to be acknowledged. The Haunting of Hill House is a ghost story. She was inspired by people going into places to hold seances and get in touch with ghosts or spirits. She wanted to write a story about it, which she did, and she did it really well. As always in horror, it isn’t just about the ghost. It’s about the people who have come to this place. It captures what’s going on internally with these individuals who are at the house, and one particular woman…[SPOILER ALERT] The way it ends, it’s so tragic. Death and grief are tragic, but sometimes not being able to be yourself or live truthfully is just as tragic. Yes, and that’s also the beauty of it. It’s not a bunch of ghosts or zombies or monsters running around. Everything is really internal. The heart of horror is what’s happening beyond the door, behind the windows when they’re closed and the drapes are drawn. What’s happening beyond a person’s smile or wave or what they’re wearing? There’s a whole other world inside, like a house, and that’s what I really love about ghost stories and hauntings. It’s the same in one of the other books we’re going to discuss, Ghost Story. Memories, regret, fear—those are ghosts too. They’re internal ghosts that we carry from the past. These ghost stories are what a lot of modern writers are tapping into because they are the books that people know about and have read."

"The Haunting of Hill House is one of several novels in which a group of ghost hunters or psychic investigators move into a house with a reputation of being haunted, and see what they find. But what makes this the greatest single ghost novel, in my view, is that it’s at least as much about the psychological interaction of the characters as it is about the overtly spectral. There’s a superb characterisation of the spinster character, who ultimately becomes one of the ghosts of Hill House, if you like. The scenes from her viewpoint are both moving and disturbing. The original film version from 1963, directed by Robert Wise—there was a horrific colour remake that is best not mentioning—is probably the only supernatural horror film that shows absolutely no visual manifestation of horror. It’s a classic case of not opening the door. And the novel does that even better. It shows how little you need to convey utter terror. There’s a remarkable moment in the novel where the source of terror is nothing more than the spinster walking across the grounds at night and stumbling across a picnic, in broad daylight, for a moment. That’s not conventionally terrifying, but it’s extraordinarily disturbing. I think you defined them pretty well just there. It seems to me that it’s the tales of psychological terror or spectral dread that on the whole last longer that the ones that simply go for physical horror. It’s the subtler ones, the ones that reach higher, which seem to survive. Yes. Although it’s only fair to say that writers like Clive Barker can be very visceral but the quality of his inventiveness enriches the imagination. Whereas too much graphic stuff can just be a substitute for imagination."

"The Haunting of Hill House is a story about Eleanor, a woman who lives with her mother and leads a very domestic life. She is called in to assist a paranormal investigation at Hill House, a place where various supernatural phenomena have apparently taken place. People have died there. As the novel progresses, she finds herself almost possessed by the building. One of the scariest things is that you don’t know whether Eleanor was in fact possessed or not. It’s as much a story about physical haunting as it is about psychological haunting. This is one of the reasons the novel is so hard to film; it’s difficult to transpose thought into images. T he Haunting of Hill House Netflix series of 2018 did it quite well with one of the episodes, ‘The Bent-Neck Lady,’ which attempted to visually capture the experience of reading the novel. “It’s as much a story about physical haunting as it is about psychological haunting” I think the real test of horror fiction, and all fiction in general, is whether you can read it again and still get something new out of it. Shirley Jackson was such a gifted writer; she never really tells you what to think and she never fills in the gaps for you. You have to do that work. The first time I read The Haunting of Hill House , I was so utterly confused by the story. Things happen so fast throughout and Jackson doesn’t dwell on them. You almost have to do a bit of a double-take—did that happen? Who else saw it? Is this person a reliable narrator? Most of Shirley Jackson’s characters aren’t. That sense of discombobulation is quite unique to her writing. Very few of her novels have rounded-up conclusions. Absolutely. So many of Shirley Jackson’s characters are like that. The character in The Bird’s Nest also has that multiplicity and unreliability about her. Hangsaman is another great example. In it, a young woman is so traumatised by her college experiences that she may have entirely hallucinated her best friend. What I find so interesting about Jackson’s characters is that their predicament and quirkiness is what makes us like them. Take the teenage ‘witch’ in We Have Always Lived in the Castle . She may be a scary pariah to everyone else, and with good reason, but it’s hard to read that novel and not be bowled over by Merricat’s idiosyncrasies. She represents the silly rituals we surround ourselves with as we grow up and try to make sense and influence the world around us. Neuroses amplify what’s at the heart of horror stories where the scariest aspects are external circumstances, usually social inequalities and ideological impositions. Yes, indeed. One of the things I teach at university is the female gothic. It was a hard choice to pick between this novel and other favourites: Daphne du Maurier ’s Rebecca , or the play Gaslight , by Patrick Hamilton. They all share the horrors of the manipulation of women by men. What’s interesting about Shirley Jackson is that she doesn’t try to portray her characters as purely naive or innocent. Hers are well-rounded characters with complex psychologies that you can believe in. But yes, this is a novel about a woman who is ultimately deeply affected by her relationship with a very controlling mother and the not very nice men who use her psychic abilities for research purposes. I think it’s one of the most brilliant attempts at updating the earlier female gothic tradition which, with Ann Radcliffe , Charlotte Brontë and du Maurier, was already quite ghostly but explainable—the horror is eventually reasoned out of the stories. Shirley Jackson plays with ambiguity a lot more."

"So it’s a quintessential gothic novel . On the surface it doesn’t appear to be doing anything too different: it’s a story about supernatural investigation—ghost hunters spending the night in a haunted house to empirically, rationally prove whether ghosts are real or not. A doctor rents a house with a terrible reputation and invites a range of people who have previously had supernatural experiences. The only two who accept are Theodora and Eleanor. It’s very short, but packed with this dense prose and disorientating, multi-sensory experiences. As it unravels, you begin to wonder whether the house is haunted or is it actually something more like The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman—a narrative of mental illness, the fallibility of perception and the hysterical woman? Or is it that Eleanor has a kind of telekinetic ability where she’s creating these disturbances herself, and she’s the supernatural figure? Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It does all that in a very short span of time, and it toys with everything that we know about the haunted house as this familiar trope and brings it right up to date, with an ambiguous ending very much in the vein of James’ The Turn of the Screw ; we’re not quite sure whether the ghosts are real or not, and it doesn’t even really matter if they’re real or not when you’ve been so effectively chilled. There was a cinematic adaptation of it in the 1960s, another in the 1990s starring Catherine Zeta Jones, and then there’s the recent TV series, which is not exactly an adaptation of the novel—it takes the spirit of The Haunting of Hill House and plays with it. There’s a character in the series called Shirley, there are characters called Theodora and Eleanor but they’re sisters. It’s successful because it’s doing something very different with the haunted house formula. So if we think of the uncanny as taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar, then an unfamiliar haunted house story is the ultimate in that. The adaptation plays with it in some really interesting ways. So Gothic fiction was a genre of writing that began at the end of the 18th century as a response, arguably, to the French Revolution —to the blood and gore and spectacle of that. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole is usually considered the first gothic novel, so it’s been around for four centuries of literary history. Some critics have argued that the reason it persists is that it has this ability to erupt at moments of cultural trauma. It changes, but some things remain consistent: it tends to be concerned with the darker side of human nature, with violence and horror and terror, with fear and sensation and excess, and often transgression as well. It’s a series of familiar tropes, like the haunted house or the monsters. Think of malicious aristocrats twiddling their moustaches. “Gothic fiction has historically been perceived as lowbrow” It has influenced a lot of writing; there are gothic elements in the realist works of Charles Dickens in the 19th century. It becomes the horror fiction blurred with science fiction in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . It’s the vampires of John Polidori and Bram Stoker and Anne Rice, who passed away only recently . Shirley Jackson very much inherited from these older gothic traditions, especially in the way she used folklore; her husband was a folklorist, she was a voracious reader and collector of lore, and she drew on lots of ballad figures in her work. She then went on to influence writers like Stephen King , and her influence can be seen in stories of telekinetic young women like King’s Carrie . So the gothic is always going through cycles of regeneration, it is always being reborn. Crucially, however, it has historically been perceived as lowbrow. It’s often written by women, for women. That kind of originates with Ann Radcliffe in the 18th century. And it’s concerned a lot with marginalised experience—racialised experience, or the experiences of being a woman or of being queer. So it’s often been on the fringes and seen as lesser. So that’s one of the reasons why a lot of critics are loath to call Shirley Jackson ‘gothic’ because it’s something associated with a lack of seriousness."

"Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is, to me, the perfect horror novel. It’s one of the magnificent achievements of literature in the 20th century. In very broad strokes, it’s about a woman who goes into an old house with some other people and… oh boy, how do I even make an elevator pitch for it? The house manifests – or is a manifestation of , arguably – her mental illness. It takes the form of hauntings, which seem to be real enough to her and to the other people in there. The narrator reckons with the notion that this house itself may be an entity: a living, breathing, malevolent consciousness. The story is a beautifully written, beautifully explicated, and beautifully felt exploration of psychosis, of past trauma bleeding out around the edges of the door that you’ve shut against it – a trauma that will not be contained. That’s a lesson of Gothic fiction over and over again: you can’t keep these things buried. They will come back in awful grandeur. So in a nutshell, that’s what the novel is – without giving away any of its treats for first-time readers. I think it’s the former. It’s a story that really walks that tight rope when it comes to revealing what is real – is this an actual haunting that she’s experiencing, or is this a psychological experience that she’s having? Shirley Jackson expertly navigates that narrow tunnel between both possibilities. You’re left with questions, a state in which I think Gothic fiction in particular benefits from – horror fiction too, but especially Gothic horror. You’re left uncertain, spiritually troubled. If Jackson had given us a definitive answer one way or another, it would have been unsatisfying. It would have undermined the entire experience that we’ve had with this protagonist throughout the novel. What she’s experiencing is an emotional, intellectual, spiritual turbulence that is profoundly disorienting, and it is disorienting for the reader too. It leaves us in that state, and that’s one of my favourite qualities about it."

"Like a lot of people, I learned about this book because Stephen King raved about it, and said it was the greatest haunted house book ever written. I read it straight through, in one sitting. I just couldn’t stop. It’s not that long, and it’s gripping. It’s a psychic investigation story, based on investigators in England like George Playfair. They conducted an investigation of what they called ‘the most haunted house in England’, Borley Rectory, where writing would appear on the walls and things would move and so forth. Shirley Jackson loved ghost stories, but it was reading about an investigation of ghosts that set her mind in motion to write Hill House . It’s interesting, because these are characters who are seeking out ghosts. They’re not moving into a new home that’s suspiciously inexpensive, and discovering mysterious things and gradually figuring out that it’s haunted. We know the house is haunted; that question has been neatly removed from the story. The question is, why would you want to go there? All the characters have somewhat different reasons, of varying degrees of seriousness. What Jackson gets across so beautifully is Hill House itself. She says it’s stood for 80 years; this would have been in 1959 when the book was published, so maybe 1879, a Victorian house in New England. It’s on an estate surrounded by grounds, and there’s a gate; it’s a house that says, “No, stay back. I’m more important than you are.” When Eleanor drives up to the house, it looms over her, and she is struck immediately by the sense that it’s vile and hideous – but at the same time, the word used is ‘arrogant’. The house is gazing haughtily down at her, and it’s not a crumbling ruin. It’s perfect. In the film, they do this beautifully; Eleanor comes in and puts her bags down, and when she reaches down for them again, she can see her reflection in the floor. It’s that polished. Everything is buffed, cleaned, dust-free, cobweb-free, comfortable, overly-ornamented, oppressive, heavy and confusing. You don’t know where you are in the house relative to any other part because of the way it’s laid out. So it’s a kind of labyrinth, and it’s all about social distance and snobbery. Eleanor is someone who has no place in the world, and like a lot of Jackson’s characters, she’s seeking admittance somewhere. She wants to belong and be cared about and be part of something, but nobody wants her. And this is very unfair, because there’s nothing wrong with her! She’s something like 33, which means she’s terribly over the hill and doomed, because she spent her life selflessly taking care of her nasty invalid mother while her sister went off to have a husband. And now her mother’s dead… Hill House is a horrifying place, but at the same time, it wants her. She tries to side with the house eventually. This is how it opens, and the minute you read this, you know what you’re getting into: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.” … and that’s reprised at the end of the book. So if that’s the case, then her hope for belonging and company is an illusion, and she’s just going to end up walking alone there forever, too. The house embodies a sense of ambivalence about connecting, a snobbery and self-importance. Part of the reason Eleanor was selected for this experiment is that she had a psychic experience as a child, where showers of stones would fall on her house, and there were newspaper articles about it. At one point, she blurts out, “The neighbours threw the stones in. My mother said that they didn’t like us because we wouldn’t mix with them” – so her mother’s not only a tyrant, but is also withholding the rest of the family from everyone else, because of self-importance. So you can see why Hill House would have a certain vestigial appeal to Eleanor. The book is so rich and so tightly written. You can’t put it down, but also, if you look at it slowly and carefully, it really rewards sustained attention. It deserves all the praise that it gets. In fact, it probably deserves more. Yes. As a piece of weird fiction, it’s really unique. It’s hard to write a weird novel. This one has a sustained intensity of effect that is achieved without having to resort to terribly drastic things happening. There’s a moment where the two characters are walking out in the grounds around Hill House, and it’s daytime, and they stumble across a ghostly picnic. The sun is shining, there’s a gambolling puppy on the lawn – it’s a family having a perfectly benign picnic, and it’s the most terrifying thing in the book. Nothing gruesome happens, but it’s been positioned just so and with such care, and the characters are in exactly the right place emotionally, so that they’re horrified. And that’s like a magic trick. I can’t explain how you do that, but it’s such a quintessentially weird thing, to shock and horrify you with something benign and ordinary. The whole book is written with that degree of care and deliberation. Shirley Jackson is uncannily aware of where the reader is and what they are seeing, what they know, what they don’t know…"