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Shirley Jackson

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The Haunting Paperback – July 1 1999

by Shirley Jackson (Author)

4.1 23,186 ratings

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

First published in 1959 under the title The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson's beloved novel 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 the psychic phenomena called "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.

“Makes your blood chill and your scalp prickle. . . . Shirley Jackson is the master of the haunted tale.”—The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Shirley Jackson (1919–1965), a celebrated writer of horror, wrote many stories as well as six novels and two works of nonfiction.

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Books
Publication date

July 1 1999
Dimensions

13.34 x 1.27 x 20.96 cm
ISBN-10

0140287434
ISBN-13

978-0140287431
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books (July 1 1999)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0140287434
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140287431
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 181 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.34 x 1.27 x 20.96 cm

Customer Reviews:
4.1 23,186 ratings

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Shirley Jackson

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Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco in 1916. She first received wide critical acclaim for her short story "The Lottery," which was published in 1948. Her novels--which include The Sundial, The Bird's Nest, Hangsaman, The Road through the Wall, We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House--are characterized by her use of realistic settings for tales that often involve elements of horror and the occult. Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages are her two works of nonfiction. Come Along With Me is a collection of stories, lectures, and part of the novel she was working on when she died in 1965. All are currently in print (Penguin). Two posthumous volumes of her short fiction are Just An Ordinary Day (Bantam) and Let Me Tell You (Random House). A graphic novel adaptation of "The Lottery" by Miles Hyman, her grandson, was published in 2016 (Farrar-Straus-Giroux). Also in 2016: Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson (Penguin Classics) and an authorized biography by Ruth Franklin: Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Norton).

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H. C.

TERRIFYING!

Reviewed in Canada on November 12, 2023

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Bought for my niece, who is a big fan of scary books, films, & Hallowe'en. She hasn't read it yet (too busy at work), but I'VE read it, more than once, & it's honestly not just the most terrifying book I've ever devoured, it's simply one of the best, period! If you don't know Shirley Jackson, you need to make her acquaintance. Her mastery of character arcs, language, mood, pacing, plot development. . .of everything, really. . .is beyond impressive. It's magical! I've read all her memoirs, novels, & short stories, & she is my favourite female writer. I read voraciously, so that means something, trust me!

Read this soon. . .now. . .just not after dark!

(BTW, the 1963 film is FABULOUS! But don't watch it alone.)

One person found this helpful

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dorothie22

Ghosts and psychology

Reviewed in Canada on March 30, 2015

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No spoilers here, but you should know that this is a psychological ghost story, meaning that you are never really sure if the supernatural events are actually occurring due to the influence of malevolent spirits, or occurring as material projections of the protagonist's disturbed psyche, or simply in her own mind. Perhaps because of this, Jackson's descriptions of the ghostly occurrences are oddly oblique and offhand, almost token restatements of the clichés of older ghost stories, as if the main interest of the narrative lies elsewhere (i.e., with the protagonist's own mental journey). This is an enjoyable read, though the weirdness takes a long time to appear -- almost 100 pages in. Is it genuinely creepy? Yes, but only in parts. Much of the arch conversation between the people gathered at Hill House seems dated and artificial. And because the narrative is sometimes ambiguous, the reader often has some work to do deciphering what's actually taking place, especially in the rather choppy (faster paced) later parts of the book. A lack of specificity, which would have been standard in earlier ghostly tales (Le Fanu, M.R. James, etc.), tends to lessen the suspense, at least for me.

One person found this helpful

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Erin Michelle Ross

An instant favorite

Reviewed in Canada on March 18, 2019

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Maybe I am a wuss, but this book is forcing me to sleep with all the lights on.

Do I blame the recent Netflix adaptation or my Goodreads pal, Julie? Perhaps I find both to be responsible for the Shirley Jackson "high" that I am on this year. Whatever the case may be, I find myself on my third SJ experience and it was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!

Dr. John Montague was a doctor of philosophy; he had taken his degree in anthropology, feeling obscurely that in this field he might come closest to his true vocation, the analysis of supernatural manifestations.

So the whole premise of SJ's original story is that Montague sets out to find a few candidates to reside with him at Hill House for either part of or the entirety of the summer months. After a through process of elimination, he finds the people that he believes will make his experiement successful. Although he is forced to select one participant because of their familial link to the owners of the house, we soon learn that two others have special abilities.

Eleanor( Nell) Vance was thirty two years old when she came to Hill House. The only person she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-in-law and her five year old niece, and she had no friends.

Theodora that was as much names as she used.... Theodora was not at all like Eleanor. Duty and conscience were, for Theodora, attributes which belonged to Girl Scouts.

Luke Sanderson was a liar. He was also a thief. His aunt, who was the owner of Hill House, was fond of poining out that her nephew had the best education, the best clothes, the best taste, and the worst companions of anyone she had ever known.

As they arrive, it is very clear that Hill House and its surroundings are not necessarily the sunshine spot of America.

People leave this town, They don't come here.

They meet the mysterious Dudleys who are the caretaker and housekeeper of Hill House and who give serious vibes that something isn't right at the house.

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 a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.

Having been raised a Catholic, if an exorcism cannot solve your problems, then RUN FOR THE HILLS!

All in all, I was so engaged in this story that it seemed like nothing else was going on around me.

Original Review on Goodreads 28/02/19( Quotes are from my kindle edition)

3 people found this helpful

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Classic Haunted House Novel

Reviewed in Canada on October 1, 2023

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I thought I had read this before but I don't think so. Shirley Jackson's classic haunted house novel is a slow burn. A group of strangers gather at Hill House to document ghostly activity. The Doctor is the one who is writing a book. Eleanor is the main character. A lonely, isolated woman with no friends. There are quiet signs of ghostly activity and then it becomes more violent and aimed at Eleanor. I wish I had liked this more but I only found it ok. There are definitely layers here to be found if you're looking for them otherwise they can be overlooked. I found this a quiet book with a bang at the end. It has an ominous, heavy atmosphere. I did really enjoy the characters even the ones I didn't like. I'm glad I read it but I prefer "We Have Always Lived in the Castle".

Reviewed in Canada on February 3, 2019

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I really enjoyed this book. The writing was, I’d like to say spectacular, but that’s not the word I am really looking for.
The descriptions of everything; the prose, was very detailed. I felt I was there myself. From Eleanor’s journey to reach Hill House, to actually being there, inside and experiencing everything that she felt.
I didn’t know what to expect when I started reading it because of Stephen King’s high rating of this book, saying, how great it was for a ghost story. I have to say, I have read every novel that he has written; he is my favourite author. So...for him to give The Haunting of Hill House such a wonderful rating...I didn’t know what to expect. I haven’t read many ghost stories prior to this.
It was graphic but not in the sense that I was so scared to continue reading. It wasn’t demonic or like The Exorcist. It was just a really great haunted house.

4 people found this helpful

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Ferd

Slow start fizzled ending.

Reviewed in Canada on January 15, 2020

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The writing was good. The characterization was impeccable. The middle was where we got our first haunting and the chills increased from there, but the ending was a bit of a letdown.

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L

Handy to have on the phone

Reviewed in Canada on February 21, 2023

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Easy download and perfect for reading on the go! This is a classic horror story, great for a late night read.

One person found this helpful

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Matheus

Excelente texto, edição razoável.

Reviewed in Brazil on November 21, 2023

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Texto excelente. A edição é um paperback simples, que se presta bem ao seu propósito.

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Elian López Reyes

Genial

Reviewed in Mexico on February 1, 2023

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Llegó bien y la portada es increíble

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Adrian Bailey

Wicked Mischief

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 29, 2023

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Before being worn down, like most words, by familiarity and quarantine, the word 'mischief' contained many connotations relating to things like evil, harm, danger, grief. In old folklore mischievous spirits induced such states - imps, demons, and things too obscene to name. Shirley Jackson sets loose a terrifying swarm of literary mischief. The author is transgressive, mixing and dissolving longed-for fixed boundaries of genres. The solidity of the 'cosy horror' story - the gothic - is there to start with but merely as a temptation for the unwary reader who settles down for a repetition of the safe and familiar narratives, thrill devices and off-the-shelf condensations of wickedness and the known unknown. Reading it, however, is a 'mad' experience. The horror is not 'out there' but all in the unfortunate reader's head. (An other connotation of mischief is misfortune or bad fortune), As in the way of all dreams and nightmares, many stories are told at once. We have to recognise both that the characters are fictional and unreal, and ghosts just like the reader whose everyday delusion of being real is blown away in the always-present shifting fluxes of shapes and time. There is an observation late on in the novel where the trees and plants feel sorry for poor mobile human creatures, unrooted, condemned forever to be blown around by these stormy fluxes. Unsurprisingly, the house is an orphanage, a school, a vanity project of a rich man, and a mental institution (as well as a depressing parody of cosy haunted house stories). It is, of course, brilliantly written. And very, very funny.

batkat

Stunning

Reviewed in Germany on November 29, 2023

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

I’m obsessed, you don’t understand, that line IS SEARED into my brain, how am I supposed to be normal about this?? you write an opening sentence like that, and I would follow you to the ends of the earth!!!

The second I’d read that sentence I felt it in my bones that this novel would bag one of my rare 5-star ratings. It reads like poetry, it reads like magic, it reads like beauty on the outside, with danger lurking on the inside.

Long have I known about Shirley Jackson and the cult-like status she (rightly!) enjoys not only among horror fans, but in the English literary world in general. As such, the fact that this edition is blurbed by Stephen King – king of horror for obvious reasons – is a bit misleading, and unfair. Misleading because I expected the same kind of horror I’d expect from It or Pet Cemetary; unfair because Shirley Jackson did everything King does now, only decades earlier. If still alive, SHE should be blurbing his books.

And no, Shirley Jackson does not write horror like King, and if you hear “horror” and all you can think of is “clown” and “undead animals” and if you then go into a horror novel expecting exactly those things from it only to end up being disappointed and letting that disappointment influence your rating, then I’m sorry because it means the term has become so uniquely specific, it excludes almost everything else that makes horror horror. It also means you should read something that is NOT what you think horror is.

No, Shirley doesn’t do King’s horror; instead, she writes about a supposedly haunted house, a doctor curious enough to move there and investigate it, and two women and a man who are just bored, adventurous, and lonely enough to move in there with him. Taking course over just a week or two, the experiment of trying to find and explain the reason for the haunting of Hill House, the house and its characters are slowly coming undone, pulling readers into unknown depths of disbelief, deceit, and despair.

Mainly told from the first-person perspective of Eleanor Vance, who arrives at the house with a car stolen from her sister (it’s half hers!) and her mother freshly six feet under, we are thrust into a setting in which “the haunted house” becomes a character in its own terms, more substantial than any of the novel’s human characters and granted far more attention than any of them except Eleanor.

This short story packs such a punch, it’s almost unbelievable, given how little is neither confirmed nor denied and how much is left up to our imagination. And yet… and yet, Jackson knows exactly where to drop that little word, that sentence that is sure to let your thoughts run wild. It’s almost impossible to consume this story sitting still. Shuffling, walking, changing sitting positions, breathless laughter over a clever pun, it’ll all happen, guaranteed.

The switch between Eleanor arriving at the house, afraid and small but simultaneously hopeful and excited for her life to start turning into a ferocious, jealousy-ridden, giggling, angry woman happens both so quickly and slowly that when you blink, the entire character has changed within the span of a second, and you blink again, and you think it must have all been a figment of your imagination. Is this genuine horror? Is the house really alive or filled with ghostly entities? Or is this a psychological terror of the mind that has Eleanor’s (in Freudian terms) Id and Superego fighting a battle of wills? The juicy and uncomfortable truth: it is up to the reader to determine what is “really” going on, and if we believe that wherever these characters came from before they arrived at Hill House is indeed the real world.

This book is so clever, and the language is so smart and timeless, at times I could not believe Shirley wrote dialogues this sharply modern. I read what the characters were saying and what Eleanor was thinking, and there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that some of those lines are exact replicas of what some of us would say were we in the same situation. It’s cutting, and it’s absurd, and it’s EXACTLY RIGHT.

This novel will be re-read and re-read and re-read because it’s great, it’s smarter than me. Because I need to underline sentences and scribble in between the lines next time I read it because reading it is like staring at a rotten brain carefully preserved in formalin, because it’s disgustingly good and haunted and crooked.

🎬 If you enjoyed this you should watch that: The Haunting of Hill House (2018)

Sara

Amazing

Reviewed in India on August 11, 2023

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It's very different from the series in case someone's expecting it to be the same. Very well written, loved it ♥️

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The Haunting Paperback – July 1 1999

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