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.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson

I brought this copy of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson at The Writer’s Museum in Edinburgh. The free museum is dedicated to lives of Edinburgh’s literary greats, Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns. You can find it after hefty walk up the Mound Steps, just to the right of St Giles’ Cathedral, tucked away in Markars’ Court. The courtyard’s flagstones are forever marked with the words of Edinburgh’s writers, and perhaps on a more seasonal basis, dotted with leftover bottles of wine from Fringe Festival revellers.

I was surprised to learn about the life of the author of one of my all time favourites, Treasure Island. The exhibition displayed photographs of Stevenson lounging in his final home in Samoa in camel coloured trousers and long riding boots, twirling his very impression moustache. After reading a timeline of his exploits in Europe, New York, San Francisco and New Zealand – to name a few – I hope one day to add his biography to my ever increasing home library.

This edition of the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is accompanied by stories which reflect the life of the globe-trotting author. If you want to read a gothic tale set in every Victorian metropolis, London, Edinburgh and Paris, this version is for you. While the witchy tale of Thrawn Jane  is written in a such strong Scottish dialect, I must plead ignorance of what actually happened – donning an appalling Frankie Boyle/ Billy Connery impression didn’t help in the slightest – the ghoulish tales of Burke and Hare in The Body Snatchers  gave me a full blown case of holiday blues and promise myself I would one day go back to "Auld Reekie”.

Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee

I never really wanted to read this book but a long train journey and a lack of any other reading material led to it being ticked off the list. I questioned the motives surrounding the publication of Harper Lee’s follow up. It was suspicious that after a 55 year hiatus, the elderly author was wheeled out of her secluded, and most likely pleasant, existence to face the second bestseller storm she would encounter in her life. However, as To Kill a Mocking Bird is such a classic, I thought I would read Go Set a Watchman just so I could answer in the affirmative when asked if I have read it.

However, I didn’t get it.

About 200 pages in I was enjoying the retreat to Maycomb, Alabama. The drawling tones of the residents, the non-abiding auto-mow-bills and the slacks the grown-up Scout loafs about in - like a fictional Katharine Hepburn - opens the story up like a feature picture in waiting. I also admired the witty rural humour and eloquent language Lee put down with ease – words like “axiomatic” and “coterie” had me hastily reaching for the dictionary.

But, spoiler alert! It was the ending that I just didn’t understand and as I thought the publication of this book was fathomlessly pointless.

So Jean-Louise (Scout) finds out her father Atticus Finch is racist and this devastates her whole conception of the world and her memories of childhood. Her fiancé is also a racist and after engaging in a blow-out row with the both of them Jean-Louise decides to promptly leave Maycomb and never return. Her uncle then shows up, proceeds to beat her up until she is seeing stars, then he gets her drunk and THEN she decides to stay.

I’d love to throw in terms like “disillusionment” or “love of family” but instead I think I will forever view To Kill A Mocking Bird and Go Set a Watchman as two things that are part of the same story -yet completely separate - like the Jackson Five and Michael Jackson’s solo career, Grease and Grease 2, Dirty Dancing and Dirty Dancing 2… the list goes on. It’s a bit of a shame really.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is an author who can make you cry with only two words – “iron bit”, “chokecherry tree”, “yellow flowers” and yet those two words can also haunt you like a powerful night terror, leaving you sick at the history they point to.

Set in the mid-1800s, in the last years of slavery, Beloved is a ghost story.

124 Bluestone Road, Ohio is troubled. Not in a spooky, spine tingling way but in the way a trauma shatters a home leaving its occupants broken.

In the first hundred words I found secreted amongst tangled phrases like “baby venom” and “lively spite” a wrathful poltergeist which the rest of the book tries to exorcise. In the final chapter there is no reequilibrium, no burst of clean sunlight or short plump woman crying “This house is clean!” Instead the feeling left in the house, and beyond, is that past demons have been dug up, unleashed into the world to rattle their chains into the present day.

Beloved is one of the most important books I think I will ever read. And I was disappointed to realise that after scouring the internet book lists for a suitable Southern Gothic, I never found it on a list. Toni Morrison’s use of the supernatural to stir up her character’s repressed memories, and the soul-breaking realities they echo is proof of the potency of the horror genre and the power of books themselves.

In Evil Hour by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of my favourite authors. Ever since I read the first page of Love in the Time of Cholera I have been enchanted by his lyrical style which infuses mystical tales with human eccentricities and sex.

 

One page written by Marquez says more than many authors say in eight hundred. His writing is like the yummiest richest cheesecake on the highest shelf of the bakery which you should only devour on special occasions.

I added In Evil Hour to my collection after discovering it in the basement of a vintage emporium. It opens up to a rain-soaked country town scarred by the memories of political upheavals and on the brink of another uprising. Townspeople awake each night to lampoons nailed outside their doors confirming shameful gossip of affairs and shoddy business deals involving donkeys.

 

While rain pelts down on the officials as they try to get to the bottom of the notices, the putrid smell of a dead cow in the river of the flooded town corrupts the air. Families wheel their belongings to higher ground and a circus visits the town.

While I wouldn’t be able to delve deeper into the political connotations of this novel, I again enjoyed the romance of the writing. The telegrapher taps out poems of love to a lady telegrapher in another town, the loud speaker of the overgrown open air cinema bounces of the walls of the church while the priest flicks through his prohibited movie list and the clandestine leaflets are found “mimeographed” on both sides.

It is part of Marquez charm that he can instantly transports you to the climate of a remote hilly Colombian town suffering from a heat-wave. Falling in line with the messages of the Autumn of the Patriarch this short novel breathes a hot breath of anger. While he himself admitted this was not his finest work, the voices of town’s populace is at times is confusing, it still stands above the finest work of other lesser authors.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe was known as the Father of African Literature. His debut novel Things Fall Apart was published by the Heinemann's African Writers Series in 1958 and since then has been translated into 50 languages and sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.

I picked up my copy of the book at the recent West Africa exhibition at the British Library, a celebration of West African history and art. A first edition of the book was on display in a section devoted to African literature and again accolades shone down on Achebe.

Things Fall Apart is held up as a classic and when reading a classic you are expected to love it and I did. What I enjoyed the most was Achebe’s deliberate style of writing. It felt like every word had been thought out and measured. While the life of Umuofia was related, and Achebe described the food preparations by the women of the tribe, the meetings of the egwugwu* and the changing seasons, every word carefully was recited as if from memory, like a folktale passed on to generations.

It is evident from the title that novel is about the collapse of something. The precise oration about the tribe’s lives remains solid like the walls of their red dirt huts until a force comes into the village and shakes apart their structure. In the final chapter the tribe’s people language is berated for using “superfluous words” – a heartrending moment which encapsulates a breakdown in translation and understanding.

Simple yet provocative, the tale reads like an extended proverb. Although seemingly straightforward and easy to comprehend, it opens up a lot of questions.

*If you want a scare, look up some pictures of these!