So after finishing the Netflix series by Mike Flanagan, I decided to go back and check out the original book upon which it was loosely based by Shirley Jackson. It’s a very short book at only 246 pages but I came away with a LOT of thoughts on the book that I’d like to write down and see what others think.
Whenever you read anything about the Haunting of Hill House, you’ll see it described as ‘one of the best ghost stories of all time’. My copy has a quote by Stephen King describing it as ‘nearly as perfect a haunted house tale as I have ever read’. It’s described as a horror book, a ghost story in the old mould of Victorian England and so on. I actually disagree with that. Ghosts are certainly mentioned and possibly present in the book but they’re not the focus of the supernatural forces or even the horror surrounding the book and the story it tells, they’re a byproduct if indeed they’re actually there.
This brings me to what I love about this book. Hill House. In the show, there are ghosts wandering the house and doing ghostly ghost things like haunting and manipulating people and all that fun stuff. The book? The true supernatural horror is focussed on Hill House itself. That’s what Jackson excels at. The House feels like another character, a sort of omnipotent force controlling and dominating the entire book. Everything that happens, every interaction or spooky event brings you back to the house. I never even considered there being a ghost in the house, rather everything that happens feels like a byproduct OF the House itself.
One of my favourite parts of the book is when Dr Montague talks about the construction of the House. He talks about how nothing is quite what t seems, an ostensibly straight stair actually bends inwards just a tiny bit, just enough to make you uncomfortable. Every dimension of the house is just off, just a tiny bit off that the human mind can’t quite cope. It’s ingenious. Because from that moment on, the House has a very real personality. It feels twisted, wrong, just off by a small small margin, just enough to make you uncomfortable.
Which brings me on to another thing I love about this book. The characters. So there are 5 main characters in my view (two more come in towards the end of the book but I’m not talking about them). There’s Eleanor, Theodora, Luke, Dr Montague and Hill House. One of the things that is brilliantly done here, is that the character arcs seem a bit backwards in a sense. The story is told from Eleanor’s POV and the further on the book goes, the harder it seems to be to really understand Theodora, Luke and Montague. They become almost more distant, their motivations a bit more hidden and even more malevolent. Theodora goes from Eleanor’s best friend at the beginning to steadily being described as proud and envious and jealous of Eleanor. Even the original character ties eg. Eleanor and Theodora, begin to break down and Theodora is paired with Luke towards the end.
At the same time, Hill House becomes more familiar. Never normal by any means, but more familiar and you get to know it’s brand of madness and darkness. You will never understand it, but you grow used in a sense to what’s going on. I will admit, it took me far too long to realise what was going on. Because the entire reason this happens is because the book is about Eleanor’s descent into madness. The House becomes more familiar because Eleanor is growing to love it in a mad, frenzied way. The humans become more distant because she’s becoming isolated from them and she’s being corrupted more and more by the house into hating them. After all that, her finally snapping at the end makes sense and becomes scarier.
That’s what’s so scary about this book. Not supernatural phenomena themselves, we’re left unsure to some degree as to what Hill House actually is or what inhabits it, but how the house destroys Eleanor. You see it stripping away her sanity, bit by bit, layer by layer until there’s nothing left. You see it isolating her, tearing them apart steadily to eventually crush Eleanor. That’s scarier than anything else in the book, how Hill House takes every insecurity of Eleanor’s, her abandonment issues, her isolation and turns them against her.
Tl;DR: Great book, very spooky, not a ghost story
by [deleted]