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Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is a book that is linked to my time at Austin College. It was my freshman year and I brought with me Library of America’s Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories which contained The Haunting of Hill House. When I started reading the book I simply didn’t want to stop. During a Zoom class, I muted the session just so I could finish reading. My mind was taken over. It was unlike anything I’d read before. Never had I seen an author be so in control of their world. I got the sense Jackson had a deeper understanding of her creation than any author before or after her.

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality” is possibly the greatest opening line ever. Hill House is a text that operates on multiple psychological dimensions. While the main character of Eleanor becomes an unreliable narrator, it’s one of the few books where the omniscient voice is unreliable as well. Her psyche infects the entire text creating the sensation that the book itself might also be haunted.

Jackson’s book is about the psychology of fear and how the overwhelming presence of it can activate one's sexuality, frustration, and true meaning. It is worth thousands upon thousands of words. It’s now my senior year and I’ve revisited the book a few times. Despite that I probably will never fully understand The Haunting of Hill House. It is a novel that can put fear into the reader while also making them want to come back to the rich characters and Earth shattering prose. One of the greatest horror novels of all time, if not the best.

Further Reading & Relevant Links

Shirley Jackson books at Abell Library

Watch The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix

Read or listen to Jackson's short story "The Lottery" as originally published in The New Yorker on June 18, 1948.

Read more about Shirley Jackson's work at Book Riot