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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 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.
Dr. Montague, a psychic researcher, decides to investigate Hill House by staying over with a small group; this goes as well as that always does.
Luke is a charming young man who will inherit the house; his presence was a condition of anyone being allowed to stay. Theodora is mildly telepathic, sophisticated, and almost certainly a lesbian. Eleanor is a painfully lonely woman who was the center of a poltergeist episode as a girl, spent her entire adult life caring for her sick mother, and has been relegated to a cot in her sister's house once her mother died. She flees to Hill House with a head full of fantasies and a desperation for escape, love, and a home. Bad move.
The haunting starts out merely unsettling, with doors that close by themselves, a freezing cold spot, and weird geometry that makes it easy to get lost. It ratchets up and up, with some very memorably terrifying moments.
( "Whose hand was I holding?"
Also, "It knows my name.").
The moment I found creepiest was when Theodora and Eleanor run through a ghostly picnic that isn't scary by itself other than that it's a scene from the long-gone past; Theodora tells Eleanor not to look back and she doesn't, but when they arrive inside the house, Theodora is in hysterics, repeating, "I looked back." What did she see?
I knew the general plot and lesbian barely-subtext from having seen the movie The Haunting, which is excellent and very faithful, so what I was most struck by when reading the book were the things I didn't expect so much.
The four inhabitants spend a whole lot of time getting to know each other before things start going noticeably bad, and it's very charming and sweet and often quite funny. The housekeeper who keeps darkly proclaiming that no one can hear you scream in the dark is downright hilarious, and so is the late-arriving Mrs. Montague and her obsession with non-existent nun ghosts. Terrifying things happen too, and there is definitely an air of building doom, but it's also surprisingly funny in parts.
The Haunting of Hill House is as much a psychological novel and a character portrait as it is a horror novel. The house is definitely and unquestionably evil, but it didn't seem to be doing much until Eleanor showed up. There's a lot of poltergeist-type phenomena; is it the house doing it to get Eleanor, or Eleanor doing it herself unconsciously, or the house tapping into Eleanor's powers to do things it couldn't do by itself?
Eleanor, who has been extremely socially isolated and subsumed into her mother's life, is trying out both social interactions and selfhood for the very first time at Hill House. There's a number of striking bits of writing in which she is consciously trying to find her own self:
Eleanor found herself unexpectedly admiring her own feet. Theodora dreamed over the fire beyond the tips of her toes, and Eleanor thought with deep satisfaction that her feet were handsome in their red sandals; what a complete and separate thing I am, she thought, going from my red toes to the top of my head, individually an I, possessed of attributes belonging only to me. I have red shoes, she thought-that goes with being Eleanor; I dislike lobster and sleep on my left side and crack my knuckles when I am nervous and save buttons. I am holding a brandy glass which is mine because I am here and I am using it and I have a place in this room. I have red shoes and tomorrow I will wake up and I will still be here. 'I have red shoes,' she said very softly, and Theodora turned and smiled up at her.
Unfortunately, Hill House is the absolute worst place for that. Eleanor wants a home and to be wanted; Hill House will provide. Unlike almost any haunted house book I've read, she is often very happy at the house and finds it cozy and comfortable (when it isn't being terrifying), which says something about Eleanor and something about the house's relationship with Eleanor.
Eleanor gloms on to Theodora, and they have some very charming interactions on the fuzzy border of instant BFFs (they pretend to be cousins, it's adorable) and lovers-to-be. The house itself seems to be pushing them around, sometimes together and sometimes apart and sometimes into a spooky melding of identity; Theodora's clothes are drenched in blood, so she has to wear Eleanor's.
Eleanor is all too relatable, at least to me. But she's both lovably awkward and creepily stalkery; late in the book she says she'll follow Theodora home, and she means it. Theodora explicitly calls her out for going where she's not wanted.
Eleanor smiled placidly. "I’ve never been wanted anywhere," she said.
It's heartbreaking and I wanted her to be wanted, but unfortunately Hill House is what wants her. In the end, her exploration of her own self fuses with what the house wants for her: it knows her name.
I am really doing it, I am doing this all by myself, now, at last; this is me, I am really really really doing it by myself.
Dr. Montague, a psychic researcher, decides to investigate Hill House by staying over with a small group; this goes as well as that always does.
Luke is a charming young man who will inherit the house; his presence was a condition of anyone being allowed to stay. Theodora is mildly telepathic, sophisticated, and almost certainly a lesbian. Eleanor is a painfully lonely woman who was the center of a poltergeist episode as a girl, spent her entire adult life caring for her sick mother, and has been relegated to a cot in her sister's house once her mother died. She flees to Hill House with a head full of fantasies and a desperation for escape, love, and a home. Bad move.
The haunting starts out merely unsettling, with doors that close by themselves, a freezing cold spot, and weird geometry that makes it easy to get lost. It ratchets up and up, with some very memorably terrifying moments.
( "Whose hand was I holding?"
Also, "It knows my name.").
The moment I found creepiest was when Theodora and Eleanor run through a ghostly picnic that isn't scary by itself other than that it's a scene from the long-gone past; Theodora tells Eleanor not to look back and she doesn't, but when they arrive inside the house, Theodora is in hysterics, repeating, "I looked back." What did she see?
I knew the general plot and lesbian barely-subtext from having seen the movie The Haunting, which is excellent and very faithful, so what I was most struck by when reading the book were the things I didn't expect so much.
The four inhabitants spend a whole lot of time getting to know each other before things start going noticeably bad, and it's very charming and sweet and often quite funny. The housekeeper who keeps darkly proclaiming that no one can hear you scream in the dark is downright hilarious, and so is the late-arriving Mrs. Montague and her obsession with non-existent nun ghosts. Terrifying things happen too, and there is definitely an air of building doom, but it's also surprisingly funny in parts.
The Haunting of Hill House is as much a psychological novel and a character portrait as it is a horror novel. The house is definitely and unquestionably evil, but it didn't seem to be doing much until Eleanor showed up. There's a lot of poltergeist-type phenomena; is it the house doing it to get Eleanor, or Eleanor doing it herself unconsciously, or the house tapping into Eleanor's powers to do things it couldn't do by itself?
Eleanor, who has been extremely socially isolated and subsumed into her mother's life, is trying out both social interactions and selfhood for the very first time at Hill House. There's a number of striking bits of writing in which she is consciously trying to find her own self:
Eleanor found herself unexpectedly admiring her own feet. Theodora dreamed over the fire beyond the tips of her toes, and Eleanor thought with deep satisfaction that her feet were handsome in their red sandals; what a complete and separate thing I am, she thought, going from my red toes to the top of my head, individually an I, possessed of attributes belonging only to me. I have red shoes, she thought-that goes with being Eleanor; I dislike lobster and sleep on my left side and crack my knuckles when I am nervous and save buttons. I am holding a brandy glass which is mine because I am here and I am using it and I have a place in this room. I have red shoes and tomorrow I will wake up and I will still be here. 'I have red shoes,' she said very softly, and Theodora turned and smiled up at her.
Unfortunately, Hill House is the absolute worst place for that. Eleanor wants a home and to be wanted; Hill House will provide. Unlike almost any haunted house book I've read, she is often very happy at the house and finds it cozy and comfortable (when it isn't being terrifying), which says something about Eleanor and something about the house's relationship with Eleanor.
Eleanor gloms on to Theodora, and they have some very charming interactions on the fuzzy border of instant BFFs (they pretend to be cousins, it's adorable) and lovers-to-be. The house itself seems to be pushing them around, sometimes together and sometimes apart and sometimes into a spooky melding of identity; Theodora's clothes are drenched in blood, so she has to wear Eleanor's.
Eleanor is all too relatable, at least to me. But she's both lovably awkward and creepily stalkery; late in the book she says she'll follow Theodora home, and she means it. Theodora explicitly calls her out for going where she's not wanted.
Eleanor smiled placidly. "I’ve never been wanted anywhere," she said.
It's heartbreaking and I wanted her to be wanted, but unfortunately Hill House is what wants her. In the end, her exploration of her own self fuses with what the house wants for her: it knows her name.
I am really doing it, I am doing this all by myself, now, at last; this is me, I am really really really doing it by myself.
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Eleanor is all too relatable, at least to me. But she's both lovably awkward and creepily stalkery; late in the book she says she'll follow Theodora home, and she means it. Theodora explicitly calls her out for going where she's not wanted.
Although I do also really like this. It's one of the most unsettling things about a book that has many, many unsettling moments--Eleanor wants so badly to be in the middle of some found family story that she's trying to force it onto the people around her and getting rejected, and it's uncomfortable no matter which end I imagine myself on.
Also, so much beautiful prose.
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Me too. Poor Eleanor.
What's so sad about her found family at Hill House is that it almost works. Everyone likes her. She's weird but they're weird too. They set reasonable boundaries, and for a while she tries to respect them. If it had happened anywhere but the most evil house in the history of ever, they probably could have worked out the awkwardness and either she and Theodora really would have created a relationship, or Eleanor might have been more okay with being friends who visit regularly.
The prose is incredible. I had to stop myself from doing even more excerpts.
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YES, that's exactly what Eleanor is doing - IIRC there's a scene near the beginning where she's imagining them as a family grouping sitting before the fire, and at this point it's all happening in her head so no one else is bothered, but it grows very naturally into Eleanor getting very VERY invested in people who only came up here for a fun ghost research weekend. If she could have reined herself in a little, might she and Theodora have become actual BFFs/lovers? Maybe, but the tragedy of Eleanor is that she's been so starved for love she just can't hold back.
The bit where she starts imagining love triangles with Luke, even though she actually finds Luke extremely dull, is also tragic in this way. She's not interested in him as a person but she knows that falling in love with a guy is supposed to be a path to freedom and belonging and a sense of identity for women, so gosh darn it she'll give it a try.
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I read the novel before seeing the film and I actually find the novel's version of this dissolution much more upsetting, even though I really liked the film.
[edit] Part of what I find so upsetting about it is that Eleanor is honestly, painfully, with almost no tools at all, trying to establish her own boundaries: as you observe, trying on where she begins and other people leave off. Not to be eaten up into other people's lives. And the house depends entirely on engulfing all of her efforts, far more permanently and inescapably than even her mother or the rest of her family. It isn't just that it offers her the wanting and belonging without any of the human negotiation. In the end, if it comes to it, it just won't care.
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Even though basically the same events happened in the film, it did feel less inescapable and horrifying.
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At some point you might need to read Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt, which is extraordinary in many respects (it's deliberately, furiously on-the-nose about certain things in a way I haven't fully digested yet, a book that's constantly almost pulling its own fiction apart from grief and rage) but also very explicitly references and invokes Hill House, including a riff on that very famous paragraph.
Hilltop Road in The Magnus Archives also has some strong Hill House resonances, but as previously discussed that series has one of your Hard Nos in.
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I haven't heard of the Rumfitt book; what's it about?
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TERF Island! A house named Albion, haunted by something which is probably fascism. Dystopia. Morissey. Three young women spent the night in a haunted house and (as is the way of these things) something very, very terrible happened, and only two of them came out again.
https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/alison-rumfitt-on-her-darkly-comic-tale-about-transphobia/
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https://kittyhorrorshow.itch.io/anatomy
You have to play it through four times to get the full experience (ETA to be clear: it changes, and some of the later playthroughs are quite short), but IMHO it's an extremely worthwhile use of a couple of quid and a few hours.
https://www.metafilter.com/159758/Every-room-becomes-a-mouth
https://www.wired.com/story/horror-video-games/
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Anyway yes, Haunting of Hill House very much deserves its classic status, IMO. The writing and the character portraits are so, so good.
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I did not click with this one because I didn't find the house creepy, BUT We Have Always Lived in the Castle is so good that it makes me want to gnaw rocks and this may have suffered from my reading it in rapid succession.
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I didn't expect Castle to scare me, so that helped! (I definitely do not think it's horror.)
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One of the things I love is that there really is no explanation, no adequate explanation, for the house being as it is. Sure, there are the stories of the people who've lived there before and how terribly that all went, but there's no sense that the house is haunted by any of them; there is nothing that used to be human about it. Somehow, through some accident in the plans, or in the building, or through an accretion of the emotions of those around it, it became alive, and, unable to dream, went mad-- unless the odd thing about it, for a house, is not that it is alive, but that it is insane.
And Eleanor, whose only life has been in dreams, it squashes not by destroying her ability to dream, but by seemingly fulfilling her dreams of companionship, family, being understood, so that she has nothing she can dream of anymore, and it can seize its moment. (If she'd been somewhere healthy, of course, she'd have grown into new goals, but--) We know it was lying about its promises, because the statement comes in again at the end: whatever walked there, walked alone.
The house is Eleanor and the house is not Eleanor, at the same time, too. The scariest scene in all of fiction, for me, is 'Whose hand was I holding?', because I don't know whether I find it more frightening if it's Theo's hand and she doesn't or can't remember, if it's a hand the house created or caused to be hallucinated, or if it's Eleanor's own other hand and she cannot know that. There is no good possibility. Every outcome is scarier than the others. And the worst possibility of all is that it's all three at once, Eleanor and Theo and the house melting into each other so there's only the one thing: the fear, and the interpersonal connection which is holding back the fear, and the connection being in its very essence a lie since the thing holding out the connection is the thing creating the fear in the first place...
Whatever Theo saw when she looked back at the picnic wasn't meant for her, which is why she couldn't handle it. It was something she should never have seen, according to all the laws of the universe, the Lovecraftian unknowable. But it was, whatever it was, meant for Eleanor, for whom it would also have been a connection cloaking an essential lie. Possibly Theodora simply saw, through the lie, what was really there.
I think one reason the book is so effective is that many haunted house novels are about the fear of death, and/or the fear of the other. The Haunting of Hill House is about the fear of not becoming the self, of dissolution of the self, of finding out that the self you have striven to become is not real, not enough, not acceptable, not valid. The fear that becoming oneself will be a kind of death, or be worse than death, or be a trap. The fear that anyone who sees one in the process of becoming oneself will betray and exploit it. And those are fears that hit very deeply.
It fascinates me that Jackson's other major novel is about someone with what I'd call an incredibly firm and distinct sense of self, where the issue is that that cannot interface with the rest of the world; in some ways the two books are each other turned inside out. Have you read We Have Always Lived In The Castle? I don't find it frightening, but it's just as good and I love it dearly.
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I agree about the real terror of Hill House. Losing one's self or finding that one's self is bad are much scarier to me than dying.
I have not read We Have Always Lived in the Castle because after the brilliant first paragraph, I am pretty sure I know exactly what happened with the poisoning. But it's probably not the sort of book where knowing the mystery in advance actually ruins anything.
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It really doesn't; I was 99% sure I knew from the start, I was right, and I still think it's amazing.
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