The Haunting of Hill House

By: Shirley Jackson

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

Now a hit Netflix miniseries directed by Mike Flanagan and starring Michiel Huisman, Carla Gugino, and Timothy Hutton

Past the rusted gates and untrimmed hedges, Hill House broods and waits.

Four seekers have come to the ugly, abandoned old mansion: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of the psychic phenomenon called haunting; Theodora, his lovely and lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a lonely, homeless girl well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the adventurous future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable noises and self-closing doors, but Hill House is gathering its powers and will soon choose one of them to make its own.

This classic horror novel has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror.

©1959 Shirley Jackson; renewed 1987 by Laurence Hyman, Barry Hyman, Sarah Webster, and Joanne Schnurer (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

I know it's a classic, but.......

Older books sometimes suffer from the information available at the time. This one does rather badly. The characters are so strange in this book. They go from being terrified of something quite unspecific to being jovially numb. It's quite unclear whether they are haunted or psychological unwell. In ways that don't make sense to any psychology I've studied. It neither ran true to the characters or the nature of hauntings. I found it very hard to finish and unsatisfying when I did.
Even when we have a book written in a time when we don't have a good idea clinically what is wrong with someone, I do expect good writing to supply a reasonable description. This rings sadly false.

Worthwhile and Compelling

I'm glad I finally got around to reading THOHH. The book is well-written (although the author's reliance on adverbs in dialogue attribution) and for the most part engaging, although it began to drag heavily toward the end.
Also, the novel is a half-century old, but somehow feels much older. Jackson's writing style does not feel particularly dated, but the dialogue and situations do.
The novel feels overlong and ultimately underwhelming, but Jackson's skillful writing and Bernadette Dunne's narration make it a worthwhile experience.

a classic that isn't as terrorizing as I'd hoped

This is a classic novel of terror, not horror -- it's more about the things that go bump in the night and set off disturbing and paranoid thoughts in people's minds. It's all psychological, no blood-and-guts violence. Still, this story (unlike some other of Jackson's works) doesn't really stand the test of time with respect to the characterizations and dialogue. I didn't like the supposedly witty banter that seemed to take up a lot of time and only made the characters seem superficial and uninteresting. I liked the opening and set up, and I liked the ending, but the middle of the story seemed too lightweight and unfocused.

Expected more

I am new to horror and expected more. I just didn't get this classic. It just went on and on and on and i forced myself to finish the audio. All the characters are annoying, especially Elenor who is crazy or possessed or maybe both. And there is the story. This is a psychological thriller more than anything else. There was a lot of dialogue about ghosts and not a lot of real ghost activity. In the end it is not clear if Elenor created this whole event in her mind and freaked everyone else OR if there was a haunting. Anyway I'm still glad I read it. Now onto to something fun and light....

Not so Haunting

This book was okay, I have read better and I have read worse. It was kind of dull and was drug out, however, this may be due to the year it was written. A portion of the book is based off of the thoughts of the main character. Authors have continually improved on the scare factor. It just didn't have me on the edge as other books can. I use this to fall asleep to at night. #supernatural #inherhead #tense #suicide #fallasleep #tagsgiving #sweepstakes