The Haunting of Hill House

First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House begins with an invitation to a house that seems to possess a will of its own. Dr John Montague, an investigator of the supernatural, gathers a small group of guests, including Eleanor Vance, a lonely young woman hoping to escape the confines of her former life, and the perceptive, irreverent Theodora, whose presence unsettles Eleanor as much as the house itself. As strange disturbances gather around them, the boundaries between haunting, psychological distress and the sinister influence of the building grow increasingly uncertain.

Jackson’s great achievement is to make terror inseparable from the longing for belonging: Hill House offers Eleanor the possibility of sanctuary even as it threatens to consume her. With its finely controlled prose, shifting perspective and pervasive sense of unease, the novel transforms the traditional haunted-house story into a subtle exploration of loneliness, identity and the fragility of the mind. Widely regarded as one of the defining works of modern supernatural fiction, it established Jackson as a singular voice in American literature, capable of revealing the darkness beneath the rituals and comforts of ordinary life.

From the book

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”

— Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

On The Haunting of Hill House

“One of the most influential haunted-house novels of the twentieth century.”

— The Guardian