The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson

The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson: 60 years after its first publication, The Haunting of Hill House remains the finest haunted-house novel in the English language, its nearest competitor a very distant second.

There's not much to say that hasn't been said already. Maybe nothing. Re-reading it again, I noted at how deftly Shirley Jackson balances the entire novel between two possible explanations, with a number of possibilities between them, right to the last words of the novel. And nevertheless leaves Hill House itself a horrifying mystery to linger in the mind long after one has finished the novel. 

The Haunting of Hill House has proven to be almost unadaptable. The great 1960's adaptation dropped a huge amount of relevant material in order to fit into a two-hour window. The solid 2018 miniseries pretty much threw in the towel on any attempt at a straight adaptation and instead constructed an alternate narrative with entirely different character representations and plot beats. And the 1999 film adaptation was an unholy abomination about which we will no longer speak.

Jackson's novel is about as densely packed as one could ask of such an elegant, often sardonic piece of work. Eleanor's story is a tragedy of forced servitude -- as the unmarried sister, she was expected to care for her ailing mother for nearly two decades. She's either the perfect foil for the house, or the perfect time bomb ready to go off. 

Her fellow characters, ostensibly there at the behest of a professor to investigate the famous ghost house that is Hill House, are sharply drawn, though the reader must be aware of how often their personalities are refracted by Eleanor's shifting perspective.

You will have your own answers to the mysteries of Hill House, and your own reactions to the marvelous characters whom Jackson puts in mortal peril at the hands of... What? Hill House is a bit of a paradox in American horror: a Lovecraftian horror rendered in entirely non-Lovecraftian prose and parameters. But in Hill House, as in sunken R'lyeh, all the angles are wrong. Highly recommended.