The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.
The Binary System Podcast team (with special guest Hannah Wallace) has already talked at length about the Netflix series “The Haunting of Hill House” here, so for my “classic” (ie: older than me) spooky book review this month I decided to read Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House.
The names are the same, Hill House is still a terrifying old mansion with its own agenda, and there are even a few random elements that made it to the TV Show (“cup of stars”). Other than that, everything in the book is different.
(I’m glad I got this warning ahead of time; if you bought the Penguin Classics version of this novel, don’t read the introduction (written by Laura Miller) first. It gives away the ending of the book and the ending to Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery”. Which I haven’t read yet. Honestly, Laura, what the heck?)
The novel’s opening descriptions of the main characters don’t inspire a lot of confidence. Dr. Montague sounds like a crackpot, obsessed with making his fortune as an expert in supernatural events and willing to rent a supposedly “haunted house” and stay there for three months with several total strangers so they can experience “real” psychic phenomena.
Luke’s aunt (who owns Hill House) describes Luke as a thief and a liar, volunteering him to stay with the group at the house so he can spend a few months away from his gambling buddies (and because the antique silver at the house would be too much trouble for him to steal.)
Theodora seems to be one of those shallow, beautiful people who sail through life, always happy, never serious, falling ass-backwards into a comfortable life.
Duty and conscience were, for Theodora, attributes which belonged properly to Girl Scouts.
And poor Eleanor just spent eleven years caring for her sick, possibly abusive mother. While Eleanor’s older sister started a life and a family, now that their mother has died Eleanor is purposeless, friendless, and miserable.
She could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair.
We see most of the story through Eleanor’s viewpoint. And surprisingly the inside of Eleanor’s head is a lovely place to start. She’s invited to stay at Hill House because of some random psychic event in her childhood that’s never really explained, and she hits the road looking forward to the first adventure she’s had in her life. She loves every moment of her drive, she daydreams constantly, and she uses every beautiful thing she sees along the way as the starting point for a fantasy of the life she could have by stopping at the tiny cottage in the garden, or the grove of oleander trees, or the mansion with the stone lions.
Time is beginning this morning in June, she assured herself, but it is a time that is strangely new and of itself; in these few seconds I have lived a lifetime in a house with two lions in front.
In fact all of the characters are better than I thought they’d be. Theo befriends Eleanor with all the easy grace and warmth that you dream about when you’ve grown up lonely and awkward and wish someone else would do all the work of making friends with you. Luke is charming, with an easy sense of humor about the house and life in general. The doctor is kind and protective, and also super-enthusiastic about his project and loves to tell stories about the history of Hill House. Even Mrs. Dudley comes across as ominous and forbidding when she sternly rattles off the rules for what she is and isn’t prepared to do for guests…and then instantly becomes ridiculous and not worth worrying about when she give the same speech – verbatim – to everyone else.
I loved the easy back-and-forth between all the guests, the way they joke and tease each other, Mrs. Dudley, the house. One of them randomly starts a game about who does or doesn’t have a beard or a red sweater and how that might or might not make that person Eleanor or Luke, and everyone else jumps in without getting annoyed or confused. Theo and Eleanor plan picnics and run laughing through the house and across the lawns, everyone enjoys a brandy after Mrs. Dudley’s excellent dinner, it all sounds like it will be a fun few months.
And yet…
Hill House is an awful place. Every angle in the house was designed to be just slightly wrong, the doors are infinitesimally off-center, the rooms are facing a different direction from what you expect so the views from the windows feel out of place. Every description hints at the house being alive; the house “rushes” around the 
person walking through the front door, the visitors feel like they’ve been swallowed, the stone tower leans menacingly. Like Jackson’s rambling sentences that wander, a few words at a time, between handfuls of commas, the rooms are dropped in place without a lot of order, some rooms nested inside other rooms like a giant maze. It’s easy to get lost, especially when doors that are propped open somehow close themselves when you’re not looking.
Strange things start happening after the first night; a ghostly animal (?) lures Dr. Montague and Luke outside. Something else tries to get into Eleanor and Theo’s room, not with something simple as knocking, but a horrifying banging noise from whatever it is beating on the door, fumbling all around the edges trying to turn the knob before stomping angrily up and down the hallway, and then laughing. Jackson can paint a wonderfully surreal scene of horror with zero gore, mostly from what she doesn’t tell you; a walk through the grounds in the sunlight turns horrifyingly black-and-white, ending with a ghostly family picnic and Theo screaming to run because of something the reader never gets to see.
Her eyes hurt with tears against the screaming blackness of the path and the shuddering whiteness of the trees, and she thought, with a clear intelligent picture of the words in her mind, burning, Now I am really afraid.
Eleanor’s relationships with the other characters start to disintegrate with the living conditions. Her fantasies turn into lies, sometimes she’s needy and clingy, sometimes she sits quietly thinking how much she hates everyone. A weekend visit from the doctor’s appalling wife and her “friend” Arthur bring some comic relief, but it doesn’t do anything to help the growing distrust and annoyance, and that awful feeling of betrayal when it feels like everyone has turned against you and they all think it’s your fault.
The story doesn’t end so much as it just stops talking and wanders away. The TV show could never make up its mind whether Hill House was a paradise where you can stay with your loved ones forever, or if it was a monster that drove people crazy and then ate them alive. Jackson left things vague in a similar way here. You never really know if it’s Hill House causing everything, or unhappy ghosts, or uncontrolled psychic abilities, or just a desperately unhappy person who doesn’t know how to deal with other human beings, and who picked the very worst place to try to learn.