"...some houses are born bad." -Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

The Haunting of Hill House is a smart book. I’m a sucker for any story that possesses a Victorian Gothic feel (long-winded exposition, overly detailed descriptions, and adverbs galore – I love it all! Ah, the Romanticism), and Shirley Jackson certainly delivers.

Haunted houses with minds of their own are among my favorite types of ghost stories. Hill House made me reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, and one of my favorite short stories by Ellen Glasgow titled “Dare’s Gift,” in which the house essentially drains the trust out of people until they betray their fellow housemates in some ghastly ways. What all these stories have in common is the possibility that the ghosts can also be read as psychological manifestations thanks to an unreliable narrator who loses touch with reality. We certainly see that happening to Eleanor during her stay in Hill House.

It’s interesting to think of the possibilities as to why Eleanor loses touch much more so than her fellow housemates. We get evidence of her vivid imagination during her drive to Hill House where she imagines breaking through the oleander she drives by to discover a magical fairy land, and then again when she tells Theo she has her own apartment with white curtains, a white cat, little lion statues, and a cup of stars. These are details she’s stolen from other visuals she has seen, which immediately sets her up as an unreliable narrator throughout all her encounters in the house, especially the ghosts. She is fanciful, wild, and looking for escape. That escapism is a great tactic Jackson seizes to set up Eleanor’s susceptibility to her supernatural surroundings, and it allows the reader to get attached to Eleanor’s emotional roller coaster ride. The want to escape and find something greater is a relatable emotion that Jackson utilizes to have her readers invest in the story of Eleanor.

Another thing Jackson does well is describing the thrill Eleanor, Theo, Luke, and the doctor feel during their first haunting. Eleanor and Theo laugh at their frightened reaction to the pounding on the door, and Luke and the doctor shake off their encounter with the apparent animal that led them outside. Once they are all back in a room together and feel safe, they realize the adrenaline rush and excitement of the whole affair. I enjoyed the way that was written because it’s much more interesting than reading about four characters sitting around drinking their brandy out of pure fright. These characters were interested and excited as well as afraid. Their personalities are sharpened during this moment and it allows the reader to watch closely as those personalities become warped the longer they are at Hill House, and the repeating question of what will happen, what will happen, what will happen next? stays in their minds just as much as it does in the readers.

I adored this book and could go on and on about the cleverness of it all. Though this novel is a popular 20^th century ghost story, I wonder about the difficulty of getting something written in this style published today? I personally love tales written this way, but know many readers who do not have the patience for a work crafted in such a voice. And then there’s the ending. I thought it was great – what better way to show the possessive relationship between Eleanor and the house then to have her purposefully and forcefully crash her car into the great tree that belongs to the house just as Eleanor belongs to the house now, too? And then again, the ending can be interpreted in other ways because there is certainly evidence strewn along in the story to support several different arguments here. I love ambiguous endings, but others hate them. The ending also reminded me of Chopin's "The Awakening," in which the protagonist, Edna, surrenders herself to the sea in order to find independence and freedom through death. Choosing death is just that -- a choice. Edna makes this decision for herself in a world where many choices have been stripped from her...a world where she's been living like a ghost. Eleanor's fate is similar when she chooses to crash into the tree and surrender herself to Hill House because it accepted her and wanted a home. In the end, she chooses Hill House as her permanent home for it seems she was always destined to die there and surely haunt it even more so than she did while alive.

So overall, this novel strikes me as a book that will be quite subjective to readers’ tastes, but for me it was a ghost story that made me not want to sleep alone in my house on the hill in the woods this weekend while my family is away…and also makes me want to write an academic paper about it (ah, it has called to my literary roots so much), and Jackson’s writing is spot on when it comes to psychological ghost stories.

            Happy hauntings,

            Sara