The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

I wanted to read a tale about a haunted house this year for October/Halloween. As autumn started to rear its pretty head I felt a craving for descriptions of old country mansions, stocked full of creaky staircases, bumps in the night and quite possibly a home library I wouldn’t have the nerve to step into.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is the definitive haunted house story.  Sitting high on a wooded hilltop, shadowing a nameless town, it is the ugliest, most fearful beast in the estate of the horror house genre. It is a shame, however, that when reading the book I felt as if the contents had been lifted and used to decorate other second-rate productions. The worst of all is that 1999 thing with Catherine Zeta Jones. I can only warn you like a gatekeeper who already knows the perils that await you, never watch that abomination which unfortunately uses that same names and premises as Shirley Jackson’s creation.

Nevertheless, nothing can spoil this classic which draws you into its confines. The first few sentences would have the well-known and recounted “In a Dark Dark Wood, In a Dark Dark House” scrambling its little legs and screaming at the top of its lungs to get away. How can a selection of the English language produce something so scary?

Hill House is “not sane” you see. Its neat, firm bricks sit in silence and whatever walks there walks alone.

 “Vile”, thinks Eleanor, the shy and unassuming member of the party of invited guest, as she drives up the house’s driveway, “get away from here at once”. The members of Dr Montague’s paranormal case study enter the house with the patter of an Agatha Christie cast and explore the labyrinth of slanted rooms. Glimpses of the history of the house are teased out, the poltergeist never forms beyond a giggle heard behind a closed door, the ending is so abrupt it feels unfinished and leaves questions unanswered.

The text of this book has been analysed by so many mediums; was there an actual haunting or was it a psychological manifestation of a young woman slowly going mad? I would be able to provide some concrete evidence if I was not taken over a compulsion to hide the book in my freezer every time I delved too close to the words on the page.

I’ve personally decided that The Haunting of Hill House is exactly that. The story is cleverly built on the past cases of other haunted mansions; Borely Rectory, Glamis Castle and Ballechin House are mentioned by Dr Montague on page 138, the arrival of the Dr’s wife brings the occult tool of the  planchette (a variation of the ouija board), while the Victorian volumes the Dr reads in bed hark back to a time of maidservants and wicked masters, that combined with the humour and twisted vocabulary of Shirley Jackson, means this book serves up a treat for October reading.