The Haunting of Hill House

Shirley Jackson 1959

Devastation Rating

Emotionally Ruined
horror mental health literary fiction loss

Our Take

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality — Jackson's first sentence is the whole novel. Eleanor's disintegration is the house's doing or her own mind's or there is no difference. This is the most psychologically precise haunted house story ever written. Jackson makes the distinction between haunted house and haunted person irrelevant. They are the same thing.

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