The Story Archive

The Haunting of Hill House

Shirley Jackson · 1959 CE · Novel · Modern / American · Contemporary

A doctor studying psychic phenomena rents an eighty-year-old New England house for a summer and assembles three companions: a woman who spent eleven years nursing her dead mother, a bohemian with a gift for telepathy, and the nephew who will inherit. Nothing in the house meets at a right angle, doors swing shut on their own, and something walks the corridor at night. Jackson worked from Victorian psychic-society reports; her opening paragraph on absolute reality is the most quoted in horror.

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Attributes

Genre
GothicHorrorPsychological
Theme
Isolation & AlienationMadnessIdentity & SelfMemory & Time
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
HeroineGhostShadow
Plot structure
Unreliable NarratorTragic Reversal
Symbol / motif
The HouseThe StaircaseThe Threshold
Conflict
vs Supernaturalvs Self
Mode / tone
GothicIronic
Culture / tradition
Modern / American

Closest analogues