I picked this up this morning and was leafing through it while I read my morning email and visited a few websites I frequent EVERY morning…I hadn’t realized when I requested this book from Paperbackswap.com that it was the book that had inspired the movie buy the same name (as there was no mention of this in the information…I mostly picked this one based on title…I love a good haunting/haunted story). Now it’s listed back up on paperbackswap.com and I’m on to book #39!! I’m about a third of the way through my beginner meditation book and a few more pages through Life’s Daughter/Death’s Bride (Gads I would love to finish that one)…and have a small stack of both fiction and non-fiction in my reading basket…I’m hoping to get thorough them in the next month or so…I’d love to come in over fifty if I can and would really like to get in a few more non-fiction titles! J
38. The Haunting
Author: Shirley Jackson
ISBN: 0-14-028743-4
Pages: 246
Synopsis: From Amazon:
Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has unnerved readers since its original publication in 1959. A tale of subtle, psychological terror, it has earned its place as one of the significant haunted house stories of the ages.
Eleanor Vance has always been a loner--shy, vulnerable, and bitterly resentful of the 11 years she lost while nursing her dying mother. "She had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it was difficult for her to talk, even casually, to another person without self-consciousness and an awkward inability to find words." Eleanor has always sensed that one day something big would happen, and one day it does. She receives an unusual invitation from Dr. John Montague, a man fascinated by "supernatural manifestations." He organizes a ghost watch, inviting people who have been touched by otherworldly events. A paranormal incident from Eleanor's childhood qualifies her to be a part of Montague's bizarre study--along with headstrong Theodora, his assistant, and Luke, a well-to-do aristocrat. They meet at Hill House--a notorious estate in
Hill House is a foreboding structure of towers, buttresses, Gothic spires, gargoyles, strange angles, and rooms within rooms--a place "without kindness, never meant to be lived in...."
Although Eleanor's initial reaction is to flee, the house has a mesmerizing effect, and she begins to feel a strange kind of bliss that entices her to stay. Eleanor is a magnet for the supernatural--she hears deathly wails, feels terrible chills, and sees ghostly apparitions. Once again she feels isolated and alone--neither Theo nor Luke attract so much eerie company. But the physical horror of Hill House is always subtle; more disturbing is the emotional torment Eleanor endures. Intense, literary, and harrowing, The Haunting of Hill House belongs in the same dark league as Henry James's classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw. --Naomi Gesinger
While I found Elanor’s character insipid and annoying in both the movie(s) and the book…the book was far more interesting in it’s detail and the second (more recent) movie based on it was MUCH different, I felt than the book. I enjoyed the movie, but am very glad that I read the book well after I’d seen either…but isn’t that usually the case? It really is an intense, psychological thriller and holds up surprisingly well, given that it was originally published in 1959. I read it in about three hours and thoroughly enojoyed the day curled up against the chill in bed, this book was defiantly worth the time spent reading it…and now it goes back to paperback swap.com!
Total Books Read = 38/50 (76% there)
Total Pages Read = 11079/15000 (73.86% there)
X-Posted to: 
15000pages; 50bookchallenge
kamyra 