The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson

I first read The Haunting of Hill House in a larger collection of Shirley Jackson’s work, and while I enjoyed it, it was overshadowed by We Have Always Lived In the Castle, Jackson’s greatest work and, to my eyes, one of the crowning achievements of 20th century literature. But Hill House really is an excellent book, and I was happy to revisit unhappy Eleanor as she undergoes her strange symbiosis with the eponymous building. For that’s how I always interpreted the book: the house found her and knew her for its own and, through its designs, kept her.

Eleanor is masterfully rendered in this book. Jackson creates remarkable characters, but Eleanor may be her crowning achievement, even more than Merricat Blackwood (though Merricat will always be my favourite). Broken by the toil and slow cruelty of an unhappy childhood cap-stoned by her years as her mother’s nursemaid—details revealed only in secondhand snippets, but precise and vivid enough to undergird a novel all their own—Eleanor tumbles from subservience to her mother to subservience to her sister. A letter from Dr. Montague inviting her to participate in a study of the paranormal gives her a chance to escape, and she snatches it with wild abandon.

In a lesser book, Montague would be the villain, his purposes for drawing disparate characters to Hill House convoluted and sinister. But he is actually a sympathetic man struggling to unite the spiritual and empiricist halves of his mind, a longstanding battle that informs his particular, idiosyncratic fascination with the paranormal. The glamorous Theodora, very much a mirror opposite of Eleanor, is the only other invitee to arrive, apart from Luke Sanderson, nephew of the house’s owner who is foisted off to keep him out of trouble. The fact that he actually doesn’t need such keeping is another detail a lesser writer would have missed.

Jackson’s characters are not broad. They are complex and troubled and hard to pin down. They bounce form camaraderie to conflict with such rapidity that it can feel shocking, but it all feels earned and natural. There are hints that the house may be manipulating them, but the extent of this is never clear. Even the actions of the ghost—if indeed there is a ghost; I tend to think the spirit is the house itself, birthed in trauma, rather than restless human soul—are opaque despite being realized in great detail (the cold spot is a nice touch, and the phantom hand Eleanor holds in an imagined darkness is one of the sharpest scenes in any horror book). Jackson draws few signposts, and the reader can infer to the best of their ability what exactly causes the final tragic events to unfold.

A neat parallel to We Have Always Lived in the Castle is the arrival of Dr. Montague’s wife, whose pigheaded spiritualism clashes with his own more nuanced take, causing a disruption in line with that of Merricat’s cousin in the later book. Their relationship is magnificently rendered, frosty without any of the cliches that mar depictions of martial strife in many other stories.

Shirley Jackson is one of America’s greatest writers. Had she not somehow excelled herself with Castle, Hill House would be her magnum opus. Any author would be proud to have such a book as their best work. The fact it is only number 2 speaks to her tremendous talent.

The King in Yellow - Robert W. Chambers

They always say you should write what you know, but The King In Yellow is a great example of why that is, in certain cases, terrible advice.

A book of ten short stories published at the end of the 19th century, The King In Yellow opens with a suite of tales that would help mold weird and macabre fiction for decades to come. Lovecraft read them. Bram Stoker read them. Even if they aren't remembered directly by that many readers, their impact is palpable.

The first story in particular, “The Repairer of Reputations,” is a force to be reckoned with. It reminded me a little of Phillip K Dick, not in style or content, but it the sheer overflowing of ideas. It takes place in an imagined future 1920s, but rather than making the setting the focus of the plot, it is almost incidental. It is in this story that we first hear mention of the eponymous King in Yellow, a play of such rhetorical power that reading it drives people mad (its influence as a literary device on Lovecraft's Necronomicon is indisputable). But this, too, is not truly core to the plot, which hinges on an unreliable narrator and his relationship with an eccentric old hermit, who has cast him in a atrangexdelusion of American dynasties.

The next three stories all share a common mythos despite varying in setting and style somewhat, and the first half rounds out with a ghost story that, while not especially original, is still engaging and well told.

It's in the second half that things take a turn. The next couple of stories become less macabre than simply odd, their weird fiction trappings conveyed more in atmosphere than plot. And then the last vestiges of the paranormal trappingsfall away, and we get stories that are mere slices of life in turn of the century Paris. “The Street of the First Shell” at least has some literary richness, focusing on the travails of the idealistic bohemian subculture in a besieged Paris during the Prussian War. At this point we've heard at least four stories about American painters in Paris—of which Robert Chambers was himself one—but each one has had something else to offer, some unique spin or take.

And then there's “The Street of Our Lady of the Fields.” I've never had a story in an otherwise solid collection squander so much of my good will. I just finished reading it and I couldn't tell you who the characters were or what happened, while I could chart out “The Repairer of Reputations” from memory almost line by line. Nothing whatsoever happens, and the trope of the American abroad, worn thin already, has absolutely nothing else to lean on, and so falls apart. The prose remains rich and eloquent, but good writing can only get you so far if the characters are bland and the story’s a dud, and I’m afriad both of these were the case here. The last story further tread this ground, though with a bit of intrigue to carry the reader along.

While uneven, the book still deserves its place in the proto-horror canon, if only for the first few stories, which are worth the price of admission.