Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House": Not as Haunting as You'd Think

Just in time for Halloween, (even if this post is a bit late) I finally finished Shirley Jackson's ghost story The Haunting of Hill House, a critically acclaimed horror novel and said by Stephen King to be one of he best of the 20th century.

Obviously, I missed something.

The novel starts out beautifully, with an amazing opening paragraph that sets up a spooky supernatural force that the characters--Dr. Montague, who engineered the experiment; Luke, the future heir of Hill House; Theodora, a lively artist, and Eleanor--will encounter. But early on the story shifts focus on Eleanor, the lonely, socially awkward young woman, which the House ultimately possesses, and spends a lot of time on her inner thoughts and feelings. These feelings are the equivalent of an insecure sixteen-year-old girl's, but portrayed in a painfully realistic manner. Psychologically, I can understand why Eleanor becomes attached to Hill House and the people in it--and the feelings that make her vulnerable to the spirits within it--but it did not scare me, or hardly even creep me out. Too much time is spent on setting this up, and even once the House starts singling Eleanor out I am not that afraid for her.

Perhaps my generation is desensitized to tales of terror, as we have decades of scary movies and Stephen King novels to have scared us out of our skins, and what was scary to people in the 1950s is probably not the same as what is scary now. Natural disasters? Scary. Mysterious diseases? Scary. Human enslavement and/or oblivion? Scary, but not in a horror-movie way. Stalkers? Scary. Being possessed by spirits? Not so much to godless heathens such as myself. Eleanor barely had a mind of her own to begin with, so there's not much fear of mind-control latent in the story, either.

I suppose that if I were in their situation, I would be scared, too, but I'm not, and in spite of the beautiful prose, it just didn't terrify me in the way it should have. That, then perhaps, is a real flaw, for though I found the characters engaging and interesting--especially Eleanor, as she was much more acutely aware of what was going on than the others--I couldn't identify with them enough to feel their fear. Was I just not reading properly? Did it just take too long to get to that point? Or, perhaps, I just found the "haunting" to be thoroughly below my expectations of acclaimed horror/terror.

The story left me with a lot of questions, for sure. Couldn't Mr. Montague see that she was in fact possessed and not merely being silly? And the spirits made her crash her car so she couldn't leave? What would even be the point of possessing anyone, let alone the most vulnerable of the bunch, in the first place?

I also understand that, like in her over-anthologized short story "The Lottery," the fact that it isn't explained makes the phenomenon that much scarier, but it frustrated me more than anything. Pretty much all that happens in the "haunting," is doors and windows closing on their own, writing written in blood (?) on the wall, unknown beings banging on doors, and Eleanor getting some weird ideas in her mind. Not that ghosts would be able to outright murder anybody, anyway, but I guess it just wasn't that scary to me.

I was so not into the story that it took me almost a month to read 250 pages of the book. For perspective, it took me about that long to read (albeit rushed) Infinite Jest, which is like 4 times as long. Perhaps it's because I'm just not that into the horror genre, especially when it comes to supernatural occurrences. The story really would have been more interesting if Eleanor and Theodora were secret lesbian lovers--which, in my opinion, was heavily implied in parts of the book--and the House was uber-conservative and didn't like that at all. In fact, I'm pretty sure the spinster sister who used to own Hill House took in that girl as a lover, as well.

So, it's an okay book, just not if you're looking for a scare. 2.5 stars out of 5.