The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

This has been on my list for a couple of years but I never could pull the trigger.  I am not sure what was stopping me…I think I thought that I had already read this years ago and I did not want to repeat.  Then, last fall, Netflix put out an 8 or 9 episode version of the book and my sister raved about it.  I DO NOT like horror movies or horror tv so I was not inclined to watch it.  However, eventually I gave in to the hype and turned it on on a Sunday afternoon while folding laundry.  If folding a weeks worth of clothes for a family of five is not enough to overcome the creepiness of a tv show viewed in broad daylight while kids and dogs wander around the house then its probably not a show for me.

Well, the show was captivating and compelling and very definitely not something I wanted to watch in the dark of night alone.  My daughter watched most of it with me over the course of the next few weeks (always during daylight hours, most frequently during the weekly laundry fun) and we enjoyed it very much.  We only screamed out loud twice.  :  )   While this is not a blog about tv shows, The Haunting of Hill House would get a high 3 or maybe even a 2…it was that good.  So, naturally, as soon as the show was over, I ordered the book.  But I could not get myself to read it for quite a while…

Finally I was out of reading material and it was right there so I dove right in.  First off, the book was written in a different age and it shows.  Family lore says that my grandmother, a prodigious reader in her own right, hailed this as the scariest book she has ever read.  In its time, and in the proper atmosphere, I can see it.  But in today’s world, where Cronin’s The Passage and King’s Pet Cemetery and Salem’s Lot have taken us farther down the rabbit hole in ways that good old Poe and Shelley would have been hard pressed to understand, Jackson’s Hill House falls short.  Psychological drama it certainly is, and there is an underlying uncertainly that prevails even at the novel’s end as to whether young Eleanor is crazy to begin with or is pushed over the edge by her time at Hill House, but the story never really served to make me more than mildly anxious, and certainly did not keep me up at night.  The whole premise was just a little too out there, and the story just a little too explainable in the context of Eleanor’s unstable state of mind, to really bother me.  I am glad I read it, I enjoyed seeing the roots of the tv series, but this was not one of those “the book is better than the movie” situations.

Rating:  #4, Like It