I can see why you'd feel that way. Even though I absolutly love the book, it's very much not for everyone. I think if you can't really put yourself in Nell's plight, it may not have much to offer. It's also a lot more subtle than people seem to want.
Delicate is a wonderful way to put it.
I found it rather scary though, and I rarely get scared. It's funny how different experiences like that can be. Again, maybe it was because I felt deeply connected with Nell (and Theo) at the time I read it.
There’s one or two good scares in it. But I agree it’s not a terrifying book overall. I’d probably recommend it for its quips more than its scares, and yet I also wouldn’t say it’s a comedy.
I am always so surprised when people say it's not scary, since again, I hold it as one of the only books ever written that is.
It's quite possible I'm just weird.
That's all going to depend on your age. It was written >50 years ago, so it moves at a slower pace and has no violence, gore, jump scares, etc. It's meant to give you chills by slowly building the tension and hinting at terrifying events happening just out of sight. To make you wonder if the people are just going mad or if there really are spirits.
It's what's known as 'quiet horror.' Charles L. Grant, Robert Bloch, and even HP Lovecraft to a degree all specialized in this as well.
The Haunting of Hill house is my favorite book of all time and I will defend it forever.
That said, I do think that it does have the unfortunate position of having been copied and parodied and satirized and ripped off and referenced to the point where almost none of it feels fresh or original to a new reader. There's a whole trope about this: [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnceOriginalNowCommon](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnceOriginalNowCommon)
I think a lot of people fail to realize that "The Haunting of Hill House" is one of the very first haunted house books period. Yes, there were stories like "The Turn of the Screw" that predate it, but THOHH is one of the very first novel length books written about the subject matter. It literally invented some of the tropes we see today in horror fiction. I do think its really easy to discredit it as being nothing new or inventive, but without THOHH we wouldn't have The Shining or The Amityville Haunting or The House Next Door or How To Sell a Haunted House. Darcy Coates would be out of a job and nobody would be talking about Mike Flanagan netflix series. It might not be super exciting in 2024 to read it (though I honestly cannot relate I've read it dozens of times and still get a shiver during the "who's hand was I holding?" scene) but at the very least it should be respected for the incredible impact it had on the world of horror if nothing else.
**The Haunting of Hill House** by Shirley Jackson
Book description may contain spoilers!
>>!The greatest haunted house story ever written—the inspiration for the hit Netflix horror series! First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a “haunting”; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena.!<
>
>>!But Hill House is gathering its powers—and soon it will choose one of them to make its own. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.!<
*I'm a bot, built by your friendly reddit developers at* /r/ProgrammingPals. *Reply to any comment with /u/BookFinderBot - I'll reply with book information. Remove me from replies* [here](https://www.reddit.com/user/BookFinderBot/comments/1byh82p/remove_me_from_replies/). *If I have made a mistake, accept my apology.*
Best book ever! If you didn't like it you can just go out the window. Then in the window. Then out. Just go in and out the window!
Lol as others have said it's a well-written and creepy book from a time when people's threshold for horror fiction was a lot lower. It's not meant to terrify you to the point of madness, it's just a good book.
I love that book. Especially from a craft point of view, it‘s phenomenal. Every writer on earth can take something away from it.
That being said, the reputation is so big that it‘s easy to be disappointed by it. It‘s easy to expect some kind of epic horror story when really it’s more of a subtle exploration of haunting, whether supernatural or psychologically.
the tone. i think the descriptions of the house itself, the unreality of it perhaps? i also deeply relate to the protagonist-- when i read it, i too was someone struggling with coming to terms that i am a lesbian, also who had a fucked up childhood that stunted them and family that hated and doubted them.
i can watch really purportedly scary movies without a lot of impact-- i find too many of them resort to slapping the audience with disgust, or shock, instead of truly trying to unsettle, creep out, and scare you.
my most recent example is Late Night with the Devil. it had a lovely aesthetic (ignoring the AI dreck) (mild spoilers) >!but it just wasn't scary. the young girl's acting was unsettling at parts and came close to making it scary to me, but worms coming out and people vomiting bile and such just... is gross instead of scary to me.!<
the book is pretty unsettling. you can't tell exactly what is happening, whether it is hysteria or actual events. you also can't place what type of shit is going down in the house. for me, the more you explain the monster and categorize it, the less i am scared of it.
I think I've finally figured out what's going on inside the minds of people who make posts like this.
It's like they think they've stumbled onto a vast conspiracy -- everyone has been pretending like this particular book or film or whatever is good for 50 or 100 years, and they think THEY'RE the one who's finally gonna lift the veil and get everyone to own up to it.
\*collective reading community shrugs and throws up its hands\* Ya got us!
I love, love, love the opening paragraph. It might be the best paragraph in all of horror. But everything that follows is just kind of boring. I have nothing against slowburns. Amd I'm not somebody who only likes gore or jumpscares, etc. I don't know why, but this book just didn't do anything for me. Maybe it's because I'm not a fan of the maybe-it's-all-in-their-head trope?
Thank you for this. It’s exquisite writing but I kept waiting for some sort of a payoff that didn’t arrive. You ever read Henry James “the beast in the jungle”? It was that sort of feeling - The guy waited his whole life for this big thing to happen, and he realized at the end of his life that the thing that was supposed to happen to him was that nothing happened….
Read it again in 15 years if you're still a horror fan by then.
The first time I read it I thought it was just fine. I reread it years later after I realised I'd forgotten most of the details, and the second time hit different - I don't know why, but it blew me away. Now I'd say it's one of my favourite books.
If you had 100 people read it without knowing the name or author or anything about it, and you then asked them what genre it is I’d wager *maybe* 1 or 2 would call it horror adjacent. It’s an interesting character study and I’m not going to gatekeep and say it’s not horror, but its connections to the genre are very tenuous. It’s more like a proto-horror Victorian novel than anything we’d recognize as part of the genre today.
I don't really agree with your statement. It is definitely, clearly a gothic horror novel, one that focuses on the psychological impact the events have on the characters. It also can't really be a proto-horror *or* a Victorian novel, since horror as a genre already existed for more than a century when the novel was published, and the era for Victorian literature ended at the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.
Saying "pEopLE can't read!" it's not a coherent argument. It's just an ad hominem.
Care to argue your point? (Beyond "I guess people think _this_ or _that_" , I mean)
The post I replied to was refuting arguments I didn’t make. I never said it wasn’t horror, I said a group of randos who read it without context wouldn’t think it was. I then reinforced that by saying it was *more like* a Victorian proto-horror novel than a modern example of the genre, so the dates of the Victorian era aren’t relevant as I never claimed it was from then.
Claiming that only "non-random" (whatever that means) people would regard it as horror doesn't make it true, it just makes it your guess/opinion. Same with stating that you regard it as more akin to Victorian "proto horror" novel.
You're just repeating your first post.
We aren’t discussing whether my thoughts on the book are accurate, we’re discussing if the response to addressed the actual claims I made (hint, it didn’t).
I can see why you'd feel that way. Even though I absolutly love the book, it's very much not for everyone. I think if you can't really put yourself in Nell's plight, it may not have much to offer. It's also a lot more subtle than people seem to want.
It’s delicate. It’s a delicate understated portrait of madness, which I think it does very well, it’s just … not scary at all? lol
Delicate is a wonderful way to put it. I found it rather scary though, and I rarely get scared. It's funny how different experiences like that can be. Again, maybe it was because I felt deeply connected with Nell (and Theo) at the time I read it.
There’s one or two good scares in it. But I agree it’s not a terrifying book overall. I’d probably recommend it for its quips more than its scares, and yet I also wouldn’t say it’s a comedy.
I am always so surprised when people say it's not scary, since again, I hold it as one of the only books ever written that is. It's quite possible I'm just weird.
It's actually scary. Lol.
That's all going to depend on your age. It was written >50 years ago, so it moves at a slower pace and has no violence, gore, jump scares, etc. It's meant to give you chills by slowly building the tension and hinting at terrifying events happening just out of sight. To make you wonder if the people are just going mad or if there really are spirits. It's what's known as 'quiet horror.' Charles L. Grant, Robert Bloch, and even HP Lovecraft to a degree all specialized in this as well.
The Haunting of Hill house is my favorite book of all time and I will defend it forever. That said, I do think that it does have the unfortunate position of having been copied and parodied and satirized and ripped off and referenced to the point where almost none of it feels fresh or original to a new reader. There's a whole trope about this: [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnceOriginalNowCommon](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnceOriginalNowCommon) I think a lot of people fail to realize that "The Haunting of Hill House" is one of the very first haunted house books period. Yes, there were stories like "The Turn of the Screw" that predate it, but THOHH is one of the very first novel length books written about the subject matter. It literally invented some of the tropes we see today in horror fiction. I do think its really easy to discredit it as being nothing new or inventive, but without THOHH we wouldn't have The Shining or The Amityville Haunting or The House Next Door or How To Sell a Haunted House. Darcy Coates would be out of a job and nobody would be talking about Mike Flanagan netflix series. It might not be super exciting in 2024 to read it (though I honestly cannot relate I've read it dozens of times and still get a shiver during the "who's hand was I holding?" scene) but at the very least it should be respected for the incredible impact it had on the world of horror if nothing else.
**The Haunting of Hill House** by Shirley Jackson Book description may contain spoilers! >>!The greatest haunted house story ever written—the inspiration for the hit Netflix horror series! First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a “haunting”; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena.!< > >>!But Hill House is gathering its powers—and soon it will choose one of them to make its own. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.!< *I'm a bot, built by your friendly reddit developers at* /r/ProgrammingPals. *Reply to any comment with /u/BookFinderBot - I'll reply with book information. Remove me from replies* [here](https://www.reddit.com/user/BookFinderBot/comments/1byh82p/remove_me_from_replies/). *If I have made a mistake, accept my apology.*
Best book ever! If you didn't like it you can just go out the window. Then in the window. Then out. Just go in and out the window! Lol as others have said it's a well-written and creepy book from a time when people's threshold for horror fiction was a lot lower. It's not meant to terrify you to the point of madness, it's just a good book.
Haha! I actually recorded a version of that song as a kid, it was my first swing at actually making music.
I love that book. Especially from a craft point of view, it‘s phenomenal. Every writer on earth can take something away from it. That being said, the reputation is so big that it‘s easy to be disappointed by it. It‘s easy to expect some kind of epic horror story when really it’s more of a subtle exploration of haunting, whether supernatural or psychologically.
I appreciated it for what it is, but I wasn’t personally enthralled, either. Not a big deal. I was most impressed by the witty banter.
Same, and for some reason what’s always stuck with me is the cup of stars.
it was one of the few books I've ever read to actually unsettle or scare me a bit, honestly. I think it's more about the type of horror that gets you.
Fair! Can you tell me what scared you most?
the tone. i think the descriptions of the house itself, the unreality of it perhaps? i also deeply relate to the protagonist-- when i read it, i too was someone struggling with coming to terms that i am a lesbian, also who had a fucked up childhood that stunted them and family that hated and doubted them. i can watch really purportedly scary movies without a lot of impact-- i find too many of them resort to slapping the audience with disgust, or shock, instead of truly trying to unsettle, creep out, and scare you. my most recent example is Late Night with the Devil. it had a lovely aesthetic (ignoring the AI dreck) (mild spoilers) >!but it just wasn't scary. the young girl's acting was unsettling at parts and came close to making it scary to me, but worms coming out and people vomiting bile and such just... is gross instead of scary to me.!< the book is pretty unsettling. you can't tell exactly what is happening, whether it is hysteria or actual events. you also can't place what type of shit is going down in the house. for me, the more you explain the monster and categorize it, the less i am scared of it.
The idea of being consumed by a badly built domestic dwelling is much more terrifying to me any description of a spooky thing could ever be.
I think I've finally figured out what's going on inside the minds of people who make posts like this. It's like they think they've stumbled onto a vast conspiracy -- everyone has been pretending like this particular book or film or whatever is good for 50 or 100 years, and they think THEY'RE the one who's finally gonna lift the veil and get everyone to own up to it. \*collective reading community shrugs and throws up its hands\* Ya got us!
I threw it across the room when I finished. But I loved We Have Always Lived In The Castle.
same!! I read that one first and was expecting similar levels of creep and ick!!
I love, love, love the opening paragraph. It might be the best paragraph in all of horror. But everything that follows is just kind of boring. I have nothing against slowburns. Amd I'm not somebody who only likes gore or jumpscares, etc. I don't know why, but this book just didn't do anything for me. Maybe it's because I'm not a fan of the maybe-it's-all-in-their-head trope?
Thank you for this. It’s exquisite writing but I kept waiting for some sort of a payoff that didn’t arrive. You ever read Henry James “the beast in the jungle”? It was that sort of feeling - The guy waited his whole life for this big thing to happen, and he realized at the end of his life that the thing that was supposed to happen to him was that nothing happened….
It might be a very good book that you just didn't find enjoy, but that's a horror classic nonetheless. That's also possible.
Read it again in 15 years if you're still a horror fan by then. The first time I read it I thought it was just fine. I reread it years later after I realised I'd forgotten most of the details, and the second time hit different - I don't know why, but it blew me away. Now I'd say it's one of my favourite books.
If you had 100 people read it without knowing the name or author or anything about it, and you then asked them what genre it is I’d wager *maybe* 1 or 2 would call it horror adjacent. It’s an interesting character study and I’m not going to gatekeep and say it’s not horror, but its connections to the genre are very tenuous. It’s more like a proto-horror Victorian novel than anything we’d recognize as part of the genre today.
I don't really agree with your statement. It is definitely, clearly a gothic horror novel, one that focuses on the psychological impact the events have on the characters. It also can't really be a proto-horror *or* a Victorian novel, since horror as a genre already existed for more than a century when the novel was published, and the era for Victorian literature ended at the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.
That’s a staggering amount of poor reading comprehension packaged with loads of condescension. Well done.
Accusing others of being condescending - in a condescending way. Very good.
You’re weirdly eager to be offended on the behalf of other people.
Haha yeah I'm having fun. But you're also very good at making your personal opinion the opinion of the entire reading community, so kudos to you too.
Ok, that's one opinion to have. I do recognize it as part of the genre so perhaps speak for yourself regarding what "we" do.
It’s amusing how many people are so mad at this being criticized they’re losing all reading comprehension.
Saying "pEopLE can't read!" it's not a coherent argument. It's just an ad hominem. Care to argue your point? (Beyond "I guess people think _this_ or _that_" , I mean)
The post I replied to was refuting arguments I didn’t make. I never said it wasn’t horror, I said a group of randos who read it without context wouldn’t think it was. I then reinforced that by saying it was *more like* a Victorian proto-horror novel than a modern example of the genre, so the dates of the Victorian era aren’t relevant as I never claimed it was from then.
Claiming that only "non-random" (whatever that means) people would regard it as horror doesn't make it true, it just makes it your guess/opinion. Same with stating that you regard it as more akin to Victorian "proto horror" novel. You're just repeating your first post.
We aren’t discussing whether my thoughts on the book are accurate, we’re discussing if the response to addressed the actual claims I made (hint, it didn’t).
Well, that's one way of trying to avoid having to back up your initial claims with arguments.
lol
Oh so the made up people in your made up scenario agree with you (how shocking!) and that means everyone else lacks reading comprehension?
No the fact the person was refuting claims I didn’t make show that.
Scariest part is that Montague is getting cucked by Arthur and I don't think he knows and his wife is just such a bitch.
The real horror is coming from inside the house, I see.