Hill House

This is my third countdown to Halloween post today. When I say I have a lot to blog about, I mean it. Anyway, I blogged before about The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, one of the great "modern" horror classics, now a Netflix TV series. I have been watching the series, irregularly, and I have been enjoying its sober approach to horror. But this is not what I have been wanting to blog about tonight. I wanted to quote the beginning of the novel, the way Hill House is introduced. Here it is: "No live organism can continue to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; every larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stodd by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood  so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone." So there you have it. No monster, no machete wielding maniac, just a setting that oozes unease and malevolence. Read this tonigh before bed.

The Haunting of Hill House

For today's countdown to Halloween post, another book suggestion. You will have a good many like these from me, as Halloween is for me and since I am an adult mainly a literary experience. I guess it is the same for many people. So I suggest today that you add The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson on your spooky reading list. I briefly blogged about it in 2017. A classic, maybe the classic of psychological horror. It made me discover Jackson's writing. Like I said in my post on the topic then, the ghosts of the story, if there are any, are barely perceptible presence. What the characters are facing might only be their own demons and Hill House might be feeding on the fears and anxieties of the living. It has been adapted in movies (the first one was allegedly great, the second one rubbish) and I know it is now a TV series, but I'd recommend that you read the novel first.

Psychological horror

This post is for the fellow Halloween lovers among you, a reading suggestion. I know that for the laymen Halloween is far away, but we know it is getting closer and if like me you are already in a spooky mood, you have started reading scary stories. I usually break the ice of not with a classic Gothic tale but with psychological horror. Usually in August, sometimes as early as late July. This year it was this book, last year it was The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. In recent years, that was maybe the best horror discovery I made. In it, there is no monster jumping from the dark, no ghost showing up in the flesh (so to speak), no blood, no gore... Only people forced to face their own demons, and maybe they are the only real ghosts of the story. I don't want to give any away, this is not a book review or an analysis, merely a plug. Read it.