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.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (2009)

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (2009): The Little Stranger begins with a brief incident involving our narrator Faraday's visit as a boy to the English estate dubbed The Hundreds, just after the conclusion of World War One. The main part of the narrative takes place a couple of years after the conclusion of World War Two, still narrated by that boy who's now a country doctor in his childhood village in Warwickshire, an area in Central England half-way between London and Liverpool and just west of Birmingham, containing Stratford-Upon-Avon and Coventry. 

Dr. Faraday's mother worked at The Hundreds as a nursery attendant; his father was also a working man. They managed to put together enough money to put Faraday through good enough schools to get through to his M.D.. He has a lingering guilt over the idea that his parents' efforts on his behalf led to their early deaths. He also pointedly feels class snobbery throughout the novel, both generally and in his practice: he feels that he's at a disadvantage against his 'higher-born' colleagues when it comes to getting well-off clients.

As the main narrative begins, Faraday answers a call at The Hundreds. His colleague who normally handles medical problems at the estate is on another call. And so for the first time in 30 years, Faraday steps into what seems to have been a shining moment in his youth. However, what he finds is becoming more and more the normative in 20th-century England -- an estate and a family fallen on hard times and in the process of falling further as Clement Atlee's new Labour government sets higher taxes on the wealthy and the landed. 

Both the house and the grounds are falling into chaos and ruin. The Ayres family, longtime owners of The Hundreds, simply don't have the money to keep things running the way they ran during Faraday's boyhood visit. Faraday is appalled but charmed by the still-impressive mansion. He's been called to find out what's wrong with the Ayres' last full-time servant, a 14-year-old maid who's only been with them for a month or so.

Faraday quickly realizes that the maid is feigning illness. She's anxious over her feelings of isolation and loneliness, especially at night in the nearly deserted mansion as she sleeps a substantial distance away from anyone else. And she believes there's a malevolent ghost loose in The Hundreds. So it begins.

The novel takes cues from a number of the greatest hits of the horror genre. It's easy to see The Turn of the Screw in the setting of an underpopulated country house as seen and described with at least some unreliability by someone who isn't from England's upper class. The Hundreds is inhabited by a mother and her two grown children. The daughter is named Caroline, the son Roderick. So the novel nods to another waning family and decaying mansion in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." You know, with a major character named RODERICK Usher. Nudge, nudge.

Mainstream critics certainly seemed to twig to these well-known, canonical works in relation to Waters' novel. The novel's style certainly suggests neither Poe nor James. It's solid and workmanlike, and the accumulation of telling detail works throughout with the slowly turning screw of the plot so as to make The Little Stranger a terrific page-turner. That the novel crashes into the mountain and explodes over the last 20 pages is a shame, but what comes before is mostly excellent.

How does a ghost story get shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, as this novel was? Well, Waters was a well-regarded, mainstream novelist. The Little Stranger deals with Great Britain's still overwhelmingly class-oriented social system to the extent that the novel's ghostly, ghastly happenings all constellate around class consciousness, class resentment, and social change. People love class-related stuff, especially when it's set in the past and especially when there's decaying gentry and giant houses involved. It's Downton Nightmare Abbey.

Dr. Faraday will become increasingly entangled in the affairs of the Ayres family. He'll reveal through his narration his growing devotion to both them and their magnificently decaying estate. Bad things will happen with decreasingly believable rational explanations. Is there a ghost? Is Faraday becoming obsessed with The Hundreds over and above his concern for the people there? Will anyone call in a vicar or read a book about supernatural occurrences published in the 20th century? Is 'spinster' Caroline, perhaps 30, really a repressed lesbian? Will Basil Exposition show up?

Well, 'sort of' to that last question. Waters generally has a light hand with explanation and exposition. But the novel's favoured explanation of what's going on at The Hundreds is so odd that the two bouts of exposition that explain the concept aren't enough to suspend my disbelief. And I'm willing to believe an awful lot in the context of a ghost story. 

But what's required here isn't simply belief in a fairly dodgy concept that shows up in some explanations of poltergeist activity. It's belief in something that can reach across miles of distance, read minds, imitate a wide variety of sounds and voices, spontaneously start fires, write in some indelible way on walls, lift and throw heavy objects, control animals, and possibly apport objects from one location to another. It's not a poltergeist or a ghost -- it's the Swiss Army Knife of the spiritual world, with powers that would make for a pretty dangerous member of the X-Men.

Some of the problem springs from the fact that the supernatural explanation has to be fitted to the novel's exploration of class resentment. And ghosts and other supernatural forces have indeed often functioned as metaphorical explorations of real-world social and personal problems. But Waters' concept has so many moving parts! And it's so programmatic in relation to the sub-text it's illustrating! It's not too far removed from the Hyper-allegorical monsters of Edmund Spenser's The Fairie Queene. Especially Errour, who vomits evil books because dammit, I you will understand this point I'm making about erroneous interpretations of the Bible as set forth during the Great Pamphlet Wars.

And so The Little Stranger ends up stranded in a sort of metaphorical borderland between the two greatest English-language haunted-house novels of the 20th century, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Richard Matheson's Hell House. Jackson's novel leaves the reader in as much mystery at the end as it does at the beginning -- supernatural events have occurred, but it's difficult to see any meaning in them beyond the basic malign, and their mechanisms are never revealed. Hell House offers a pseudoscientific explanation for its horrors, fully explained and reasoned through, and satisfying in a literary sense without destroying any of the horror that has preceded the final solution.

The Little Stranger stands between these two. There's still mystery at the end, but the novel has advanced a preferred or privileged explanation of the reasons and mechanisms of the haunting. But that explanation is too brief and patched together to seem convincing. 

The novel also falls away from the peaks of the haunted-house novel as a sub-genre because of an attribute it shares with many of Stephen King's novels: the dominance of the sub-text. The Shining is a haunted-house novel that has a very clear and intentional sub-text; it's the haunting as an elaborate metaphor for domestic abuse as perpetrated by an addictive personality under pressure. Obviously there are other things in there too, but the sub-text looms over the events in the Overlook Hotel. Similarly, The Little Stranger uses the supernatural to discuss issues of class and gender in England after World War Two (and, really, to the present day -- it's not like the gentry have gone away). 

But the aforementioned novels by Jackson and Matheson aren't about something other than the supernatural, at least not in the programmatic way that the Waters and King texts are. They're ultimately about the hauntings themselves, and how small groups of people deal with them. The Haunting of Hill House and Hell House engage fully with the Sublime and the mysterious. The Little Stranger does not -- nor does it seem to want to except in a couple of brief passages. As such, it's a finer novel involving class conflicts and social change than it is a ghost story. And there's certainly nothing wrong with that.

The Little Stranger is a heck of a ride, dense with period detail and blessed with a narrator who may be too sympathetic for the novel's own good. That he's unreliable and obsessive may or may not matter -- the novel certainly privileges one reading of the events over all others by the conclusion, but it doesn't seal off one's ability to read things in other ways. The major characters are all skilfully drawn, a period skilfully evoked, a disintegrating house skilfully drawn so as to almost become a character itself. Highly recommended.

He is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson (2009), edited by Christopher Conlon

He is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson (2009), edited by Christopher Conlon with an Introduction by Ramsey Campbell, containing the following stories:

Throttle by Joe Hill and Stephen King
Recalled by F. Paul Wilson
I Am Legend, Too by Mick Garris
Two Shots from Fly's Photo Gallery by John Shirley
The Diary of Louise Carey by Thomas F. Monteleone
She Screech Like Me by Michael A. Arnzen
Everything of Beauty Taken from You in This Life Remains Forever by Gary A. Braunbeck
The Case of Peggy Ann Lister by John Maclay
Zachry Revisited by William F. Nolan
Comeback by Ed Gorman
An Island Unto Himself by Barry Hoffman
Venturi by Richard Christian Matheson
Quarry by Joe R. Lansdale
Return to Hell House by Nancy A. Collins
Cloud Rider by Whitley Strieber 

Award-winning, enjoyable anthology celebrating the late, great Richard Matheson, whose horror and suspense work in print, in movies, and on TV helped define horror and suspense for two generations of readers and viewers.  Duel; The Shrinking Man; Hell House; I Am Legend; What Dreams May Come; Stir of Echoes; Somewhere in Time; episodes of The Twilight Zone, including the William Shatner-on-a-plane "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" remade with John Lithgow in The Twilight Zone movie; adaptations of Poe for Roger Corman's film studio: these are just some of Matheson's contributions to pop culture. 

The stories include homages, sequels, revisionist takes, and riffs on Mathesonian ideas. "Cloud Rider" by Whitley Strieber is the wildest riff in the anthology, inspired as it is by Matheson's entire Collected Stories. The other stories are a bit more specific.

Standouts include Nancy Collins' novella-length prequel to Hell House, that inspired haunted-house story of the 1960's. Collins shows us the events that preceded those in Matheson's novel, to good effect. Mick Garris also offers a prequel in "I Am Legend, Too," and it also offers a revisionist take on the original Matheson novel's vampire-fighting protagonist from the POV of his vampiric next-door neighbour. "She Screech Like Me" by Michael A. Arnzen effectively extends Matheson's stunning debut story, "Born of Man and Woman," while "The Diary of Louise Carey" by Thomas F. Monteleone retells The Shrinking Man from the viewpoint of his increasingly beleaguered, non-shrinking wife.

The venerable William F. Nolan offers a short, brutal sequel to another Matheson horror story, while Joe Lansdale presents a sequel/sidequel to Matheson's "Prey" -- a.k.a. the Matheson story adapted for the TV movie Trilogy of Terror, in which Karen Black does battle with a tiny, violent, highly animated African fetish doll in her own apartment. And Stephen King and son Joe Hill (King) collaborate on a story for the first time, a riff on "Duel" that involves a motorcycle gang and a transport truck instead of the original's station-wagon-driving salesman and a monster of a truck.

Overall, this is a fittingly strong anthology to honour such a major figure in the modern history of fantasy. As Ramsey Campbell notes in his introduction, Matheson helped move horror out of Gothic castles and into suburban bedrooms and America's endless blacktop highways. And because Matheson worked in television and movies so much after 1960, his works reached much larger audiences than those generally afforded writers of prose. Recommended.

The Quiet Ones (2012)

The Quiet Ones: written by John Pogue, Oren Moverman, and Craig Rosenberg, based on the screenplay by Tom de Ville; directed by John Pogue; starring Jared Harris (Professor Coupland), Sam Claflin (Brian), Erin Richards (Krissi), Rory Fleck-Byrne (Harry), and Olivia Cooke (Jane) (2012): The 'true events' this movie claims to be based upon took place in Toronto, Ontario and not in and around England's Oxford University, where the movie is set. The events also bear virtually no relation to the movie other than the fact that human beings and seances figure in both. And oxygen, I guess. The planet Earth. The protagonists were directly beneath the Sun at some point.

The Quiet Ones even shows still photographs at the end which one assumes the viewer is supposed to believe are photos of the actual participants. They're not. I actually like this last bit -- it seems like a critique of all those ridiculously fictionalized 'true ghost story' movies. It's the smartest thing about the movie. Or the fakest. 

I can see why The Quiet Ones sat on the shelf for a couple of years before being released by the reconstituted Hammer Films. It's a movie woefully short on the sort of concise and capable characterization needed for the audience to give a crap about what's happening to whom. Alternately, characterization can be replaced by a complicated and interesting story behind a haunting, or by the deployment of some form of fascinating exposition, or by terror itself -- thrills, chills, and spills. The Quiet Ones is thin on all these fronts. It feels like a plot outline rather than an actual script was filmed.

So anyway. The real Toronto experiment involved an attempt to prove that ghosts were really psychic phenomena created by living people, primarily by having a group of people invent a fake ghost and then try to will it into existence. The mostly terrible recent movie The Apparition also spun out from this initial premise. 

The Quiet Ones inverts that premise: an obsessed psychic researcher/Oxford professor (Jared Harris, struggling mightily with his underwritten, unsympathetic, one-note character) and his trio of (grad?) students try to prove that the ghost haunting a poltergeist-plagued orphan is the creation of her psychic talents and not an actual ghost.

If you've seen or read Richard Matheson's terrific novel-into-film Hell House, this will all sound vaguely familiar. If you haven't, then read and watch Hell House (well, the movie's re-titled Legend of Hell House) instead of The Quiet Ones.  Or read Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, with its formerly poltergeist-plagued protagonist and its massively haunted house and its team of ghost researchers. Or watch the early 1960's adaptation of Jackson's novel, The Haunting. The Quiet Ones simply isn't very good or very smart. Not recommended.

Hello, Walls!

The Legend of Hell House: adapted by Richard Matheson from his own novel; starring Roddy McDowall (Ben Fischer), Pamela Franklin (Florence Tanner), Clive Revill (Dr. Barrett), Gayle Hunnicutt (Ann Barrett) and Michael Gough (Belasco) (1973): The late, great Richard Matheson adapts his own haunted-house novel here in effective fashion, especially given what couldn't be shown in a movie of the time. The whole thing even manages to make an impossible-not-to-laugh cat-attack scene work without the benefit of CGI.

Where Matheson's I Am Legend gave vampires a scientific rationale for existing, The Legend of Hell House offers a quasi-scientific exploration of an extraordinarily dangerous haunted house. There's certainly a tip of the cap to Shirley Jackson's monumental haunted-house novel The Haunting of Hill House starting with the title and the four-person psychic investigation team.

But whereas Jackson's novel offered no real antagonist other than the house itself, Matheson's work gives us a malign human -- Emeric Belasco, builder of the house and a Satanic presence who would have made Aleister Crowley look like the Church Lady.

Back in the 1920's, Belasco built the house and then sealed it away from the outside world with its two-dozen or so inhabitants inside. When the house was opened, everyone was dead and Belasco had vanished. One of the subtle drolleries of Hell House is that the most haunted house in the world is less than 50 years old: it was built to be haunted.

Teams investigating the house have been devastated by Something, to the extent that the only one of a dozen previous investigators to survive both physically and mentally is Roddy McDowall's Ben Fischer. Fischer was a teen-aged medium when he entered Hell House with the last group to investigate it before the events of the novel. Now, he's the middle-aged Voice of Doom with a new team which ultimately aims to use technology to dissipate Hell House's restless spirits. Good luck with that.

The performances here are all fine, and suspense builds to a satisfying conclusion. McDowall is especially fine as the withdrawn and wounded Fischer. The book fleshed out Fischer's personality by describing his thoughts and experiences. Here, McDowall has to build his wounded psychic without the benefit of voice-overs. I think he succeeds admirably, as does the movie itself. Highly recommended.

Proof

Rose Red: written by Stephen King; directed by Craig R. Baxley; starring Nancy Travis (Professor Joyce Reardon), Matt Keeslar (Steve Rimbauer), Kimberly J. Brown (Annie Wheaton), David Dukes (Professor Carl Miller), Judith Ivey (Cathy Kramer), Melanie Lynskey (Rachel Wheaton), Matt Ross (Emery Waterman), Julian Sands (Nick Hardaway), Kevin Tighe (Victor Kandinsky) and Emily Deschanel (Pam Asbury) (2002): King's penchant for synthesizing different horror tropes fails him here in this wearying miniseries from 2002 that focuses on a rag-tag assortment of psychic investigators/actual psychics and their investigation of Rose Red, a sprawling Seattle haunted house roughly the size of the New Orleans Superdome. Or possibly the moon.

Rose Red's fundamental problem may lie with King's stentorian approach to the haunted house sub-genre. Subtlety and gradually escalating weirdness are the hallmarks of the two great American haunted house novels (Richard Matheson's Hell House and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House). Rose Red leads with an extraordinarily overt manifestation of psychic powers, one that echoes and amplifies a similar incident from Shirley Jackson's novel to such an extent that the miniseries clearly establishes itself as taking place in an alternate universe where psychic powers must have been confirmed long ago by science.

With too much (yet not enough) already established about psychic powers, the miniseries starts throwing everything and the kitchen sink into other areas. Hill House and Hell House both initially sent 4-person teams of paranormal investigators into their haunted houses. Rose Red sends eight. Or possibly nine. Or a dozen, if you count the people who show up throughout the main part of the movie. Hell House and Hill House gave us large but explicable mansions.

Rose Red gives us something that's larger than the Winchester House and which builds new rooms itself, a trick the Winchester House never mastered. This remarkable self-building has apparently been confirmed on many occasions by flyover photographs of the sprawling complex. Wouldn't a house that verifiably builds itself without people pretty much confirm supernatural activity? Why is this movie about an academic whose reputation rests on whether or not she can confirm supernatural activity? Such activity is everywhere!!! Buy a camera!

So the psychics and the scientists and the hangers-on all show up, and they all have readily verifiable psychic powers, and we also learn that about 50 people have gone missing at Rose Red over the century of its existence. You'd think the authorities might want such a place torn down or blown up. But they don't. It's still there. Still growing. Still eating people.

The acting is pretty scattershot and the direction by Craig R. Baxley obvious and only rarely subtle. Rotting, animated corpses dominate the proceedings, somewhat counterintuitively at certain points when the house is ostensibly trying to get people to join it of their own free will. Because look, you get to be a rotting corpse for all eternity! Who handles the marketing for this haunted house? Not recommended.

The Real Monster Homes of Maine

Hell House by Richard Matheson (1970): Matheson's great ghost story pays homage to Shirley Jackson's earlier, great haunted-house novel, The Haunting of Hill House, in many of its attributes. As in Jackson's novel, Hell House gives us a quartet of psychic investigators led by an academic and weighed down by personal issues who've been brought together to stay in an extremely haunted house for several days.

Matheson's novel focuses on the always fuzzy world of "psychic research" far more than Jackson's did. The psychosexual issues are much more overt. And unlike Hill House, where the haunting seemed to be a matter of a Bad Place rather than individual Bad Ghosts, Hell House appears to be the domain of the ghost of Emeric Belasco. Matheson loosely bases Belasco on Aleister Crowley, black magician and self-proclaimed "wickedest man in the world." Belaso is much wickeder: his remote Maine mansion was the site of mass murder, suicide, and worse. But when the authorities finally broke into the mansion in the 1920's, Belasco was nowhere to be found among the dead.

Hell House is set in 1970. Two previous attempts to probe the mysteries of Hell House, the last in 1940, ended in the deaths or institutionalization of all those involved but one. And that one, a then-16-year-old boy judged to be one of the greatest psychics ever, is along for this expedition. Why? Because a dying millionaire is paying him and the others $100,000 each to try to figure out from the evidence of Hell House whether the human soul survives death.

As with his great, rational vampire novel I am Legend, Matheson herein sails the edge between the supernatural and the scientific. The physics professor who leads the expedition believes that ghosts are a product of human minds interacting with a charged psychic environment left behind by traumatic events in a specific location. There is no life after death except as an amorphous energy field subject to the fears and hopes of the living. The academic's wife isn't so sure. And the two psychics know that there's something more than that going on. But what?

Matheson doesn't write 'long.' Hell House is fairly brief and to-the-point, and its structure is as much mystery novel as horror novel. But the horrors are quite potent, and the characters sympathetically drawn even as they wrestle with their fears and their failings. Highly recommended.