Haunting of Hill House

This fall semester I took a senior seminar for my major on "Literature of the Fantastic." We read chronologically starting with E.T.A. Hoffman's "The Sandman" from the mid-18th Century and ended with a collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber (1979) by Angela Carter. My understanding, for those of you who aren't familiar -- I sure wasn't before the semester began -- is that Fantastic's beginnings are aligned with the advent of the world in which we live now: a modern, industrialized, increasingly complex society. It follows the strangeness of population growth and urbanization, the proliferation of bodies and culture.

The Haunting of Hill House was a really fun book to begin wrapping up our discussion of this genre because it is packed with literary and cultural allusions and available to a compelling variety of theoretical interpretations and literary analyses. My class' approach to Fantastic literature was that the genre represents the darker side of modernity; an era in which everything is in motion, categories are no longer fixed and social codes are reformulated. With this reading in mind, Jackson is really quite masterful. Plus, guys, it's totally creepy. The surprising thing is that Hill House isn't gory or even scary, really. It definitely doesn't feel like a horror novel. But the language and the story are just downright unnerving yet totally dynamic and fascinating, a style that Shirley Jackson is famous for. I was extremely drawn in by the low-grade anxiety that I felt from page one...if you think you might be as well I definitely recommend it.