Recommendations from our site
“As a piece of weird fiction, it’s really unique. It’s hard to write a weird novel. This one has a sustained intensity of effect that is achieved without having to resort to terribly drastic things happening. There’s a moment where the two characters are walking out in the grounds around Hill House, and it’s daytime, and they stumble across a ghostly picnic. The sun is shining, there’s a gambolling puppy on the lawn – it’s a family having a perfectly benign picnic, and it’s the most terrifying thing in the book. Nothing gruesome happens, but it’s been positioned just so and with such care, and the characters are in exactly the right place emotionally, so that they’re horrified. And that’s like a magic trick. I can’t explain how you do that, but it’s such a quintessentially weird thing, to shock and horrify you with something benign and ordinary.” Read more...
“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...
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
