The Haunting of Hill House

Description

By Shirley Jackson

Four people come to stay at Hill House, a mansion with a bad reputation: Dr Montague, an occult scholar looking for hard evidence of a haunting; Theodora, his cheerful assistant; Luke, who will one day inherit the place; and Eleanor, friendless and fragile, who has spent her life being needed by a mother who has just died.

Nothing in the house is quite at a right angle, and the doors will not stay open. Jackson never states what is there, and the novel leaves it genuinely unclear whether Hill House is haunted or whether Eleanor is.

First published 1959