#181. "The Haunting of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson

Few authors knew how to write tension as well as Shirley Jackson. There is a level of trust she forms with her readers that causes them to lean forward and read with morbid curiosity the exploits of her characters suffering from their own strange ailments. They are tragic, but more importantly, they are familiar. The motivations are those of everyday dysfunction, and in he case of "The Haunting of Hill House," she outdoes herself by finding the perfect balance between interior and external dread. A visit to a house with an ever-changing layout results in moments of hallucination and fear that escape the melodramatic texture it suggests. By the end, the reader feels as connected to the characters as they are to the building they inhabit, maybe even causing them to question their own floor plan and experience their own optical shenanigans.

Few buildings have had an aura quite to the level of Hill House. To see Jackson describe the walls is to feel trapped in a dreamlike state. It becomes suffocating to see her mix the inanimate with a deeper sense of history that informs how the stairs spiral out of control, and the colors become their own headache. This is a triumph in description and manages to raise fear over the things unknown. Every new detail of the prior residences causes concern for the future owners. Superstition arises and suddenly the brisk tale becomes one that feels never-ending.

This could be because the story is ultimately one of the most touching explorations of mental illness from that time. The more that Jackson shifts to character studies, the more she allows for a sense of doubt. Is this a supernatural occurrence, or are people genuinely losing their minds? It's a story that clashes with more conventional familial affection in an attempt to find ways to survive the absurdity. Even as it leans heavily into horror tropes, it grounds the struggles in a recognizable pathos. The parallels become clearer as the story progresses until Jackson reveals that the reason that Hill House is so scary is because of the solitude and detachment from the rest of the world. When you're left with your own paranoid thoughts, how are you going to survive?

Even more than Daphne DuMaurier's timeless "Rebecca," "The Haunting of Hill House" is a great horror novel that personifies the indescribable in ways that elevate the tension into something that gets under the readers' skin. It results in a tale that leads to one of the most memorable settings in 20th century literature and causes one to begin sipraling out with their own conspiracies - not only of the novel, but maybe of their own lineage. Is everything as secure as they think it is, or will everyone fall victim to the shallow void that exists when there's no protection from it? It's hard to say, but like the best of fiction, once the reader starts their journey, it'll be impossible to fully remove oneself of Hill House's impact.