The Haunting of Hill House

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

* * * *

Eleanor Vance was thirty-two years old… The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends. This was owing largely to the eleven years she had spent caring for her invalid mother, which had left her with some proficiency as a nurse and an inability to face strong sunlight without blinking. She could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair.

* * * *

It was the first genuinely shining day of summer, a time of year which brought Eleanor always to aching memories of her early childhood, when it had seemed to be summer all the time; she could not remember a winter before her father’s death on a cold wet day. She had taken to wondering lately, during these swift-counted years, what had been done with all those wasted summer days; how could she have spent them so wantonly? I am foolish, she told herself early every summer, I am very foolish; I am grown up now and know the values of things. Nothing is ever really wasted, she believed sensibly, even one’s childhood, and then each year, one summer morning, the warm wind would come down the city street where she walked and she would be touched with the little cold thought: I have let more time go by. Yet this morning, driving the little car which she and her sister owned together, apprehensive lest they might still realize that she had come after all and just taken it away, going docilely along the street, following the lines of traffic, stopping when she was bidden and turning when she could, she smiled out at the sunlight slanting along the street and thought, I am going, I am going, I have finally taken a step.
 
— from The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Eleanor is going to Hill House. What do you suppose will happen when she gets there?

If you have not read this book then I envy you, as I do anyone experiencing a good story for the first time. Read it. It’s short and powerful, frightening not with blood or gore but only through the slow revelations of the fears and madness that people carry inside.

And do see the fabulous 1963 movie The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise and starring Julie Harris as Eleanor. But do not see the stinky terrible deeply stupid horrible bad 1999 remake, ick ick ick.

I’ve always loved Jackson’s work; she was an awesome writer, spare and specific and very good at capturing the superficial interactions of people with all the tar bubbling underneath. She’s a writer that new writers can learn from — about economy, how to report things about a character without stooping to the dreaded “telling,” how to show the nuances of sexual tension or fear or rebellion without pounding it into the reader’s head.

So I was delighted back in 1998 to be invited by Ellen Datlow, fiction editor of OMNI, to take part in a round robin story with Graham Joyce, Ed Bryant and Kathe Koja. The conceit of round robin is that each writer takes a turn with the story, writing a short entry (500 -700 words) as quickly as possible, then passing it along to the next person.

We decided our story should be an hommage to Shirley Jackson, and that’s how we started it, although I think it drifted fairly quickly (grin). It was a fascinating experience working with these folks. I enjoyed coming home from my work at Wizards of the Coast, grabbing a beer on my way downstairs to my basement office, turning on the computer, reading whatever entry had been handed off to me, and then…. just beginning. Exhilarating stuff. Here it is, if you’d like to read it. But, straight up, Jackson is better (grin).

I am going, I am going, I have finally taken a step — who among us does not know that feeling? It’s a pull like leaning over the roof edge of a very tall building. It’s the thrill when everything you know disappears in the rearview mirror and you are clean and new, you could be anyone, and nothing you’ve left behind can touch you. It’s only what’s ahead that will shape you now. Or at least, that’s what we want so badly to believe. Jackson knows better; and Eleanor will find out that we always bring ourselves on these journeys.