Julie's Journal : The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

In the weeks leading up to Halloween, I saw several recommendations for good ghost stories.  Now, I'm not normally a big reader of ghost stories, but I kept seeing The Haunting of Hill House come up as a must read - a classic of the genre.  After reading several reviews and discovering that it has been adapted for film twice since its publication in 1959, I decided to give it a try. 

The story centers around Eleanor Vance.  A woman of 32, she has spent the last eleven years of her life caring for her mother.  After her mother passes away, she is at loose ends and jumps at an invitation to spend a few days at Hill House seeking out psychic phenomena.  After an idyllic drive, Eleanor arrives at the house and is immediately repulsed.  She feels an overwhelming urge to flee, but decides she is simply being a scaredy-cat and makes herself stay.  When she meets the other female guest, Theodora, she feels more comfortable.  With the arrival of the doctor researching the house, and Luke, a member of the family that owns the house, their party is complete. 

The horror of the story is that the reader never really knows the nature of the evil in the house.  There is no question that there is something evil there, but whether the evil is the house itself or something residing inside is a mystery.  The house itself becomes a malevolent character in the story.  Told from Eleanor's point of view, the reader is forced to follow along as the house (or its supernatural resident) drives her, rather quickly, into madness.  Maybe her years of isolation with her mother made her more susceptible than the others?  Maybe she was already precariously close to madness, and the house just helped her along?  I think both factors contributed to her inability to resist the forces of Hill House.

I enjoyed The Haunting of Hill House.  It was not what I was expecting from a book labeled "horror".  There was an overriding sense of doom, but it wasn't so dark as to give me nightmares.  I found myself thinking about Eleanor long after I had finished the book.  Her motivations are never completely clear, which fuels in part the speculation about why she descended into insanity so easily. 

Jackson wrote several novels and short stories.  Her other well-known story is the short story The Lottery.  It is commonly read by high school students and I remember reading it myself.  Both The Haunting of Hill House and The Lottery are worth taking the time to read.