The Haunting of Hill House in Easley Library Bookworms

Jun 01, 2009 Werner rated it it was amazing

Shelves: supernatural-fiction

Note, Feb. 11, 2014: I edited this review just now, to make use of the spoiler tag feature Goodreads added since it was written. Now, the entire review doesn't have to be hidden to mask a couple sentences of spoilers!

This was initially a difficult book to review, and especially to rate; it definitely benefited from some time to reflect on it, so as to develop a tentative understanding of what was going on, because Jackson revels in ambiguity here. A two-star rating was out of the question; whate Note, Feb. 11, 2014: I edited this review just now, to make use of the spoiler tag feature Goodreads added since it was written. Now, the entire review doesn't have to be hidden to mask a couple sentences of spoilers!

This was initially a difficult book to review, and especially to rate; it definitely benefited from some time to reflect on it, so as to develop a tentative understanding of what was going on, because Jackson revels in ambiguity here. A two-star rating was out of the question; whatever a person's reaction to the book is, it probably wouldn't be a mild "okay." :-) But while a one, three, or four star rating would all have been justified, none of them by themselves would have told the whole truth: there were aspects of the book I disliked, but also some that I liked, and some I really liked (or really disliked). I finally settled on five, because it was "amazing" in a real way --not "amazingly enjoyable," but amazing in the consummate skill with which Jackson created a read that has exactly, IMO, the effect she intended.

Her intention, I believe, was to demonstrate that the world does harbor malevolent forces; and that to cope with them, an attitude of timid surrender and passivity is definitely not what we need. But that, of course, is exactly the attitude that Eleanor has ingrained over a lifetime spent in being a full-time doormat, afraid to have an identity or a will of her own. The agency of malevolence that Jackson brings her up against is not, I think, a ghost as such, but a house itself which has absorbed so much negative psychic energy --starting with its builder, Hugh Crain, a man tormented and angry over the death of his wife (the "scrapbook" he produced for his daughter drips with suppressed rage and hostility)-- that it has become sentient and hostile to the human race. And since the energy it's endued with is psychic in nature, it can "read" the humans who enter it, and mess with their perceptions --even dominate them with destructive mental suggestions, if they let it. (view spoiler)

Though the description of the essential wrongness and asymmetry of the house's physical geometry conjures an image that's almost Lovecraftian, Jackson does not here impart a message of existential horror; Hill House is not a microcosm of the universe, and the triumph of malevolence is not necessarily inevitable. Her horror, rather, is of the traditional situational kind, in the Poe mold: Eleanor is just the wrong person, in the wrong place and the wrong situation. But horror in the book is real and potent, and can claim a life (and though Jackson isn't saying that sentient houses actually exist, here as in "The Lottery," the fictional threat symbolizes very real forces in the actual social world we live in). (view spoiler)

Jackson's style here owes a lot to Henry James (not only to The Turn of the Screw, as one of my Goodreads friends commented, but to his ghost stories in general). That has its minuses; his penchant for a marked concentration on the interior mental life of impressions, fancies, perceptions, feelings and intuitions (which may not be valid) is a big influence here, and this can be more tedious than illuminating, as it often is in James' own writings. But it has its pluses as well. The descriptions that introduce the characters, and many of their conversations, are masterpieces of Jamesian irony that brilliantly delineate the kind of people they are. And there is no blood and gore, no gross-out, no gratuitous sensationalism in Jackson's portrayal of the supernatural; her horror is psychological in nature. And as the geographically undefined setting suggests, it can unfold anywhere --including right wherever you and I live. ...more

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Jan 18, 2013 Crystal rated it liked it

Shelves: get-from-the-library, fiction, audiobooks, classics

I chose to listen to this book in order to pass the time while organizing and cleaning the kitchen. I remembered Ms. Jackson's stirring short story, "The Lottery" and hoped this would be just as intriguing. I used the book as an incentive to get done a job I did not want to do and it was treat was to listen to this book as I went about my task. This book has been on my list for a while, after learning that Ms. Jackson wrote in this genre. I don't read many supernatural thrillers but this one was ...more

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May 01, 2025 Amber marked it as to-read · review of another edition

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Dec 19, 2024 Tempest Lew marked it as to-read

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