Book Bearings
The Haunting of Hill House
- 246 pages · about 4 hours
- First published 1959
- 75 editions
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1 About this book
First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a "haunting"; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House.
At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers— and soon, it will choose one of them to make its own.
- Horror
- Psychological fiction
- Haunted houses
- Gothic revival
- Gothic
- Ghosts
- Ghost stories
- End of the world
2 What to expect
A short, classic haunted-house novel: a small group spends a summer in a notoriously sinister mansion to study it, and the house seems to single out the most fragile of them. The terror is psychological and ambiguous, seen largely through the mind of a shy, lonely young woman, so it is never certain how much is the house and how much is her. The prose is precise and quietly strange, and the fear comes from suggestion, not gore.
Good for readers who want: a classic ghost story, psychological horror, and a short, unsettling read.
3 About Shirley Jackson
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 More by Shirley Jackson
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