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The Best Fiction Books » Horror

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
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The Haunting of Hill House

by Shirley Jackson

Recommendations from our site

“It’s a quintessential gothic novel. It’s very short, but packed with this dense prose and disorientating, multi-sensory experiences. As it unravels, you begin to wonder whether the house is haunted or is it actually something more like The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman—a narrative of mental illness, the fallibility of perception. Or is it that Eleanor has a kind of telekinetic ability where she’s creating these disturbances herself, and she’s the supernatural figure? It does all that in a very short span of time, and it toys with everything that we know about the haunted house.” Read more...

The Best Shirley Jackson Books

Joan Passey, Literary Scholar

“One of the scariest things is that you don’t know whether Eleanor was in fact possessed or not. It’s as much a story about physical haunting as it is about psychological haunting.” Read more...

Scary Books

Xavier Aldana Reyes, Film Critics & Scholar

“This book is one of several novels in which a group of ghost hunters or psychic investigators move into a house with a reputation of being haunted, and see what they find. But what makes this the greatest single ghost novel, in my view, is that it’s at least as much about the psychological interaction of the characters as it is about the overtly spectral. There’s a superb characterisation of the spinster character, who ultimately becomes one of the ghosts of Hill House, if you like. The scenes from her viewpoint are both moving and disturbing.” Read more...

The best books on Horror Stories

Ramsey Campbell, Novelist

Other books by Shirley Jackson

Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

Hangsaman
by Shirley Jackson

Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson

Life Among the Savages
by Shirley Jackson

The Letters of Shirley Jackson edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman

The Letters of Shirley Jackson
edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman

The Lottery, and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

The Lottery, and Other Stories
by Shirley Jackson

'Home' in Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson

'Home' in Dark Tales
by Shirley Jackson

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

We Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Shirley Jackson

Our most recommended books

  • Collected Ghost Stories
    by MR James

  • The Haunting of Hill House
    by Shirley Jackson

  • Frankenstein

    Frankenstein (Book)
    by Mary Shelley

  • Dracula
    by Bram Stoker

  • We Have Always Lived in the Castle
    by Shirley Jackson

  • The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
    by Robert Louis Stevenson

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