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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Rating: 4.5/5
Pages: 288 (9hrs)
Started: 1 June 2024
Finished: 3 June 2024
Summary:
Though Nell was only one of many people who received an offer from Dr. Montague--to assist him in his paranormal research in Hill House, a secluded mansion with a dark past--she was one of the only people to actually accept. With her mother recently dead and her only other family a married sister whom she doesn't particularly like, an adventurous few weeks of freedom and ghost-hunting seems positively thrilling. Meeting the doctor, exploring the strange, maze-like house, and getting closer with the other assistant Theodora, as well as Luke, a member of the original owner's family, are all exciting. But there is something wrong with Hill House. It's not just the hauntings; those were expected. It's more like Nell can feel Hill house creeping into her.
Thoughts:
This is such a cool horror novel. The plot and characters were intriguing--I was hooked from the first few minutes of the audiobook. It seems like a pretty classic story, with the naive girl going into the gothic mansion to escape her boring life, and then encountering more horror than she bargained for. But Nell's strangeness was so compelling, and it came through in her narration in a way that was enthralling. The other characters were also really interesting, especially Theodora with her eerie social power and thinly veiled lesbianism, and the dynamics between characters fascinated me. They pushed at the lines between strangers and lovers and family members in a way that was exactly as horrifying as Jackson meant it to be.
This novel also played with form and time in a cool way. Chapters felt fragmented and endless, and although there were constant reminders that the events of the story were all taking place within a week, it felt hard to believe that so little time was passing. By the final quarter of the book, I as a reader felt as disoriented in time and space as Nell did, which I loved. Interestingly, this was not a Gothic novel--although it began in the way Gothic works do (a young girl enters an eerie manor) this story was instead purely horror; instead of the protagonist breaking away from the Gothic manor's spell and ending it by burning the house down, Nell was entirely taken over by the manor, which was her doom. However, the story used Gothic tropes (entrapment and madness, for example) to create a sense of horror which was extremely effective.
Shirley Jackson impressed me even more with this book than with We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I highly recommend this novel to any horror fans who haven't yet read it, and intend to read more of Jackson's work in the future.