The Haunting of Hill House

Despite the title, the story's never about ghastly apparitions but more of one's sanity, the climax reveals all in one chapter. Nell isn't a likeable heroine at all, weak willed, self deprecating and dull - but she's the narrator and I am forced to be lost in her slowly crumbling already unstable mind, which was quite interesting. Even at the end, despite some mysterious occurences happened to all characters, I am not so sure whether it's all her own imaginations only.

Shirley Jackson was born in California in 1916. When her short story, 'The Lottery', was first published in the New Yorker in 1948, readers were so horrified they sent her hate mail; it has since become one of the most iconic American stories of all time. Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in the same year and was followed by Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, widely seen as her masterpiece. In addition to her dark, brilliant novels, she wrote lightly fictionalized magazine pieces about family life with her four children and her husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. Shirley Jackson died in 1965.

I like gothic and horror literature. And I really liked Jackson's short-story, The Lottery. Yet, the Haunting of the Hill House disappointed me with its loose plot, where almost nothing occurs. The book has a good beginning; it moves you and makes you say "Oh, this is going to be scary." However, once you proceed, you see that the plot has a smooth line. It has also one of the worst endings in a book. It ends in the middle of nowhere. It just does. There are other characters coming to join the haunting, bu