Horror writers today hold Hill House up as a shining example of the genre. Strange noises, unexplained events and writing on the walls begin to appear, with Eleanor in particular drawn deep into the house’s embrace. Montague and his assistants assemble at Hill House, where everything feels slightly wrong – “somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair”.
One of his three recruits for the project is Eleanor Vance, an immensely lonely woman who has spent her life caring for her loathed mother. Jackson’s story follows occult scholar Dr John Montague as he decides to explore the phenomenon of the purportedly haunted house (“a place of contained ill will”). ‘Who else could terrify with the sight of a picnic on a lawn’ … Shirley Jackson in 1951. Stephen King, in his history of the horror genre, Danse Macabre, said The Haunting of Hill House is – along with Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw – one of “the only two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years”, while Ramsey Campbell called it “the greatest of all haunted house novels, and arguably the greatest novel of the supernatural”. Published in 1959, Jackson’s resulting novel has defined the haunted house story ever since. “They thought that they were being terribly scientific and proving all kinds of things,” she said, “and yet the story that kept coming through their dry reports was not at all the story of a haunted house, it was the story of several earnest, I believe misguided, certainly determined people, with their differing motivations and backgrounds.” As Shirley Jackson told it, the inspiration for The Haunting of Hill House came after she read about a group of 19th-century psychic researchers who moved into a supposedly haunted house in order to study it.
0 kommentar(er)
