The Haunting of Hill House (Penguin Classics)

The Haunting of Hill House (Penguin Classics)
by Shirley Jackson

The Haunting of Hill House (Penguin Classics)
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Book Summary Information

Author: Shirley Jackson
Editor: Laura Miller
Edition: Paperback
Published: 2006-11-28
ISBN: 0143039989
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: Penguin Classics

Book Reviews of The Haunting of Hill House (Penguin Classics)

Book Review: Excellent
Summary: 5 Stars

I have been fascinated with Hill House since my teens. This was an amazing story then and it remains a classic with good reason. It's dark and atmospheric with just enough suspense. It's thoroughly engrossing. Jackson was a forerunner of female horror authors during this era and her material matched that, if not exceeded, those from her counterparts.

Eleanor is a beaten character at the start of the book. She was under the rule of an overbearing mother and upon her death, Eleanor goes directly to the overbearing rule of her sister.

Her hopeless existence is interrupted by a unique opprotunity to leave it all. She seizes the chance and enters Hill House.

This is an excellent read.

Summary of The Haunting of Hill House (Penguin Classics)

Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has unnerved readers since its original publication in 1959. A tale of subtle, psychological terror, it has earned its place as one of the significant haunted house stories of the ages.

Eleanor Vance has always been a loner--shy, vulnerable, and bitterly resentful of the 11 years she lost while nursing her dying mother. "She had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it was difficult for her to talk, even casually, to another person without self-consciousness and an awkward inability to find words." Eleanor has always sensed that one day something big would happen, and one day it does. She receives an unusual invitation from Dr. John Montague, a man fascinated by "supernatural manifestations." He organizes a ghost watch, inviting people who have been touched by otherworldly events. A paranormal incident from Eleanor's childhood qualifies her to be a part of Montague's bizarre study--along with headstrong Theodora, his assistant, and Luke, a well-to-do aristocrat. They meet at Hill House--a notorious estate in New England.

Hill House is a foreboding structure of towers, buttresses, Gothic spires, gargoyles, strange angles, and rooms within rooms--a place "without kindness, never meant to be lived in...."

Although Eleanor's initial reaction is to flee, the house has a mesmerizing effect, and she begins to feel a strange kind of bliss that entices her to stay. Eleanor is a magnet for the supernatural--she hears deathly wails, feels terrible chills, and sees ghostly apparitions. Once again she feels isolated and alone--neither Theo nor Luke attract so much eerie company. But the physical horror of Hill House is always subtle; more disturbing is the emotional torment Eleanor endures. Intense, literary, and harrowing, The Haunting of Hill House belongs in the same dark league as Henry James's classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw. --Naomi Gesinger


The classic supernatural thriller by an author who helped define the genre

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.

Jackson, Shirley Books

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