Hill House, Not Sane
A Review of A Classic Horror Novel
Because life is too short to read bad books, I do my best to keep my literary diet heavy on the classics. I’ll happily read the latest lightweight adventures, too, but those are the potato chips of books, and this man needs to sink his teeth into a thick slab of red meat. (And now I’m hungry. Be right back.)
Reading the classics also gives me valuable lessons that—hopefully—make me better at writing. There are, after all, very good reasons why a classic is regarded as a classic.
In this first attempt at persuading you to read good books, I am reviewing The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson, 1959). If you have not yet read this book, and you are assuming from the title that it is about a haunted house, you would be entirely correct. In fact, this book is almost-universally included in lists of the best haunted house stories ever written, alongside The Shining and The Woman in Black.
The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, has one of the best openings ever, celebrated by everyone from experienced professional writers and academics to newbies. It establishes a creepy and menacing tone, and makes it clear (as any good haunted house story does) that the house itself is one of the main characters:
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
I’d put that opening paragraph alongside any opening in the world of fiction, including the beloved openings we see in works like Pride and Prejudice, White Fang, or The Hobbit.
The premise of the novel is straightforward: Dr. John Montague is a paranormal investigator, a skeptical man of science, and he wants to spend three months in Hill House, a remote place famous for supernatural phenomena, where he will seek solid proof that the so-called psychic manifestations are either real or unreal. The owners of Hill House persuade him to bring along a representative of the family: Luke Sanderson. Luke is the black sheep of the family; a disreputable selfish young man who will one day inherit the house, but who can’t entirely be trusted not to make off with the silverware if nobody’s looking.
The remaining two members of the party are chosen for their prior experience with the supernatural. Eleanor Vance had been involved in a poltergeist incident in her childhood, and Theodora (no last name ever revealed) has a reputation for psychic abilities. These two are a study in contrast: Eleanor is weak and submissive, while Theodora dominates any room she enters. Eleanor has spent the last eleven years at home, caring for her invalid mother; Theodora is a free spirit who disdains family encumbrances.
And then there’s the final major character: house. Everything about it feels wrong. The angles seem off, it’s too easy to get lost in, and the doors won’t stay open. It is a dreary, dark place that immediately begins to influence the mood of those who enter.
As these four characters settle in to Hill House, they begin with lighthearted banter and witty jokes. But as the house exerts more power over them, it all stops being funny. Sounds in the night. Half-seen figures. Writing on the walls. And the nightmarish question: “whose hand was I holding?”
In his nonfiction book Danse Macabre, Stephen King famously differentiated between three kinds of terror, later summarizing them in a Facebook post in 2014:
The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...
Of those three, the emphasis in The Haunting of Hill House is on the version that King called The Terror, the “worse” of the three. The narrative leans toward complexity and understatement, relying on atmosphere and ambiguity, and emphasizing the psychological effect of the house on the characters to create the terror. We are often not told exactly what is going on, or why, and the audience can drawn more than one conclusion about the “real” cause of the events.
The philosopher Noël Carrol, in his theory of horror, describes the audience’s/reader’s response to the horrific as an alloy of revulsion and fear. Beyond the threat to life and limb, there is something nauseating about the monster in a horror story: the clamminess of a vampire’s touch, the smell of rotted meat on a werewolf’s breath, the putrefied flesh of a zombie. Hill House, not sane, works with this principle on a psychological level. People keep referring to Hill House as “filthy,” leprous,” “bloody,” and so on, even though there does not seem to be anything physically wrong with the place. When Eleanor first arrives, her immediate reaction is: “Hill House is vile, it is diseased.”
This book is the product of a masterfully-skilled writer, and deeply impacted me at an emotional level. I was unsettled by the effects of Hill House on the characters’ minds, unsure when I was seeing their real personalities, the force of the house being exerted on them, or something deep inside themselves that the house was drawing to the surface. I also had moments when I wanted to yell “Don’t do it, you idiot!” at one or more characters. It also affected me deeply enough that I am currently trying my hand at a haunted house short story (I’ll let you all know how it goes).
If you want to enjoy a haunted house novel that is heavy on psychological terror and chills rather than gore and shock, I highly recommend The Haunting of Hill House. If you’ve read this book, please let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.