The Haunting of Hill House: I Can’t Think of Anything Clever to Say About This Book

January 28, 2016

What can I say about The Haunting of Hill House?

No really, what can I say? I’m kind of at a loss.

I had high hopes for THoHH (that’s some sweet alliteration right there, eh?). I’d read passages from the book before that were held up as like the gold standard of characterization and setting mood. The way people talk about this book is as if it’s just the best damn thing ever.

It was fine. It didn’t bother me. It didn’t make me puke on myself in disgust or pee my pants in fright. It didn’t really cause me any kind of bodily eruption at all. It was just fine.

So that’s kind of my problem with writing a blog for the THoHH. I can write about bad books. In fact, it’s probably more fun to write about books that make me want to gouge out my own eyeballs. But books that are just fine make me really have to work to come up with some good subject matter. Here’s what I got. May it not induce bodily eruptions in you, dear reader.

The Haunting of Hill House is a misleading title. A more fitting, if less marketable title would be “Four Strangers Hanging Getting to Know Each Other at Hill House Which is Incidentally Pretty Creepy and Probably Haunted Too.”

Aside from some writing bugaboos that got under my skin which can be largely explained by the time the story was written (“The number of Tom Swifties in the book made my head want to explode,” he blogged irritated), the prose was really solid. I think it’s a testament to Shirley Jackson’s writing that Hill House itself comes across as a legitimately creepy place, despite the fact that very little actually haunting takes place in the book.

Maybe the problem was that I read this book with skewed expectations. I was expecting to be scared, but that’s probably unfair. Very few books actually scare me, and I don’t find hauntings to be all that scary anyway so I probably shouldn’t have expected much in that area anyway. To make matters worse, my expectations of genre were probably skewed to. Yes, THoHH was nominally a horror story in the haunting subgenre, but it was more “genre literature” than anything else.

And as a literature novel, it was a bit more compelling, though I’d probably need to go back and read it a second time to get into the deeper subtextual elements that I missed while I was hopefully waiting for an elevator of blood or maybe some zombie clowns or something.

Eleanor in particular felt like a fully three dimensional character and it felt as if there was much more to her than was directly revealed. The problem I had with her, and with the story in general, is that there just wasn’t all that much actually there. I liked the idea that Eleanor had these lingering issues with her mother’s care and death, but they never felt fully explored and linked to the plot of the book. The plot seemed to be “Eleanor went to live in a haunted house, started going crazy, got kicked out, and wrecked her car on purpose.”

I’m not one to limit a book’s appeal completely to the plot, but at a certain point I need SOME of it to be laid out for me. There were just so many elements that were inferred that it almost like I was asked to construct my own version of events. Now, I’m fine with that to some extent, but if I want to create a fantasy world, what the heck do I need the book for? The setting just wasn’t moving enough, and the characters not quite interesting enough, for me to stay full invested.

Now, tell me what an art-hating philistine I am for being unmoved by one of the supposed best literary horror stories of the 20^th century.

No really. I need the traffic.

Written by michaelkingram Posted in Uncategorized