The Haunting of Hill House

The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson
Publisher: Penguin, 1984 (originally Viking, 1959)
ISBN 0140071083

Dr. John Montague “had been looking for an honestly haunted house all his life,” and he finds it in Hill House. Montague rents the place for three months and invites a small group to join him, to observe and record whatever they may encounter. Staying with Montague are Luke Sanderson, the future heir of Hill House; Theodora, a young woman with some extrasensory perception abilities; and Eleanor Vance, a young woman with repressed powers of telekinesis. Like Montague, “ever since her first memory, Eleanor had been waiting for something like Hill House.” The house seems to feel the same way, and messages begin to appear on the walls, first written in chalk, then in blood – “HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR”.

If “The Haunting of Hill House” can be classified as horror, then it is a subtle horror indeed. The ghostly manifestations take the form of odors, cold spots, and thumping noises. Jackson creates effective scenes of terror – things go bump in the night, literally, at Hill House. “[T]he iron crash came against their door…and the sickening, degrading cold came in waves from whatever was outside…Eleanor and Theodora saw the wood of the door tremble and shake, and the door move against its hinges.” A few nights later, Eleanor thinks she is holding Theodora’s hand in the darkness while “the little gurgling laugh came again, and the rising mad sound of it drowned out the voice”, but then she realizes with revulsion that it is not Theodora’s hand. “God God – whose hand was I holding?” Along with the moments of terror, there are also episodes of boredom and meandering conversations. Luke and the doctor play chess in the evenings while the women sit by the fireplace and talk. Eleanor often wanders within her own imagination, losing herself in reveries – and one of the unanswered questions of the novel is how much of the haunting Eleanor may have imagined, and how much she may have caused by herself.

Stephen King has said that he admires Shirley Jackson’s writing, and King’s novels demonstrate Jackson’s influence. In “The Haunting of Hill House”, Jackson describes the shower of stones that fell on the Vance’s house for days, and how Eleanor and her sister Carrie each thought the other had caused it. King opens his first novel, “Carrie”, with a newspaper report about a similar rain of stones on the White’s house. And at the start of his second novel, “Salem’s Lot”, King quotes the opening paragraph from “The Haunting of Hill House”.

Within Jackson’s novel, Eleanor thinks, “Perhaps she was to be allowed to speak occasionally for all of them so that, quieting her, they quieted themselves and could leave the subject behind them; perhaps, vehicle for every kind of fear, she contained enough for all.” The passage works equally well as a description of Shirley Jackson’s writing – fictional chills that seem real enough under the reading lamp, but that fade away in the glare of daylight.

Jeff Edwards spent the first 30 years of his life in Maryland, then moved to a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, in early 2000. Having enjoyed reading and writing his own stories since childhood, Jeff is currently coming to terms with his lifelong passion for the horror genre.

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