Hill House is fantastic

review - Created: 2026-04-09

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

I didn’t plan to read The Haunting of Hill House. I picked it up on impulse—part of a 2-for-1 deal in King’s Cross Station WHSmith. I don’t even remember what the other book was. I went into it blind (not even knowing if I was “supposed” to like it, which is rare).

When I try to articulate what this book is about, I find myself stuck. My notes refuse to cohere into anything beyond a collection of bullet points: moments that unsettled me, sentences I highlighted, a bunch of impressions and no solid conclusions. It’s difficult to summarise because it isn’t especially plot-driven. Instead, Shirley Jackson has written a disquietingly clever character study. Everything in the story bends back towards our protagonist: Eleanor.

At a very high level, four seekers arrive at Hill House looking for evidence of a haunting. Eleanor is one of them. She is fragile and isolated. The others are Dr Montague, a scholar of the occult; Luke, the heir to Hill House; and Theodora, a bohemian artist. At first, the novel gives these side characters some weight. We have a sense of everyone: Theodora is self-assured, Luke is stupid, and the Doctor is naïve in his academic seriousness. They recede as the book progresses. Their benign intentions start to feel ambiguous and eventually hostile. Whether this shift is real or not is never entirely clear.

Each event reads less like a piece of external action and more like a confrontation between Eleanor and herself. There’s a persistent tension between who she believes she is and who she might actually be. She invents versions of herself that are more confident and desirable. She even momentarily believes in them. She rehearses for conversations with Theodora and ascribes deep meaning to small gestures from Luke.

Hill House acts as a participant in this process.

Every angle is slightly wrong. Hugh Crain must have detested other people and their sensible, squared-away houses, because he made his house to suit his mind. Angles which you assume are the right angles you are accustomed to, and have every right to expect are true, are actually a fraction of a degree off in one direction or another.

This is a haunted house story in the purest sense. Unlike the TV show, no discrete ghosts are wandering the halls. The true supernatural omnipresence is the house itself. It participates and drives Eleanor’s delusions. As she moves through it, expecting solidity, everything remains just slightly off.

It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house ; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.

What makes the novel disturbing is its psychological precision. The stream-of-consciousness narration feels uncomfortably real, capturing the kinds of thoughts that are usually too fleeting or too private to articulate. Whilst we can’t ever directly relate to Eleanor, we have a sense that her inner monologue isn’t entirely foreign.

The novel feels unfinished. Eleanor is delineated with such care that the other characters seem to fade into partial sketches. Dr Montague’s empty marriage, for instance, is introduced and then largely abandoned. When his wife eventually appears—along with her companion—it feels less like an expansion of the narrative and more like a disruption.

TLDR: I’d highly recommend this book. It’s a very delicate horror.

Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?