Spoilers Ahead: 

This is another book of mine I had to read for my university class, and I must admit, I really enjoyed it. I’ve been getting quite into the horror genre over the past year or so, and so I’ve always been looking for good horror recommendations, as I find it hard to find any to buy, let alone any that are any good. Fortunately, I really enjoyed reading this book. 

We follow a group of people as they are invited to stay in a house. Eleanor, who is the main and sole POV of the story, tries to convince her sister to let her borrow their shared car, and she says no, because the person who invited them (Doctor Montague) sounds dodgy, and her sister uses that as a reason to not allow her to take the car. However, Eleanor doesn’t listen to her, and she steals it anyway. 

Eleanor drives to Hill House, and when she gets there, she feels a little uneasy. The guy by the gate tells her to leave, and won’t let her in, but Eleanor refuses to go home. Eventually, he lets her in. The house itself is very ugly, and it has a weird aura about it, making her feel even more on edge. The partner of the guy at the gate, Mrs. Dudley, has a set script of things she says, and she tells Eleanor the ropes, for the first and definitely not the last, time. Eleanor is the first person there, and goes to find her room. 

The next to arrive is Theodora. They immediately go around the house, and start trying to figure out the rooms, and they become quite attached with each other. They finally meet Doctor Montague, and eventually another guy called Luke. They’ve all been invited to this house, and they stay up and drink and chat, and they start to bond really well, before they go to bed. Montague says that he will stay up and make sure everything is okay. 

Very quickly, things seem to go wrong very quickly. There are things written about Eleanor on the wall, some in blood, and there are things that are knocking on the door, and a cold chill is going over the rooms of a night-time. Now that I’m writing it, I realise that, plot-wise, there isn’t actually a lot that happens. It gets to the point where they are all shaken up, blaming each other, and Eleanor is pulling away from the others and creating this barrier, until they eventually tell her to leave, and she crashes her (sister’s) car into a tree, therefore TW killing herself. It’s a very strange read, but definitely a good one. 

As I said, I was really fond of this book, surprisingly. I thought the tone of the story was really good, and I liked the pacing. It isn’t as scary as I had hoped it would be, and the only part that really got me was when Theodora was holding someone’s hand, thinking it was Eleanor’s, but it wasn’t. There were a few other points where I felt a bit uneasy, but not to the point where it kept me awake. I suppose that’s a good thing, but also, I was kind of hoping for a little scare. Also, some of the language felt a little odd to me, I think because of when it was written, and so sometimes it was hard to picture what was actually happening sometimes. And also, with the characters, it felt very unhinged at times, especially with the dialogue and the relationships between them, and how quickly it could go from 1 to 100 in a matter of seconds. Half the time, most of what they said was just said out of blue, and the conclusions they came to were very far from what I took from it, but it made it so interesting. 

Character-wise, I wasn’t a fan of any of them, if I’m being honest. If anything, I think Luke is my favourite character, and he’s supposed to be disliked – I assume, from the tone and style that the author has written him in – and the others are just a little distasteful. Eleanor has a whiny attitude, a very much “woe is me” kind of vibe, and it’s honestly a little draining at times. I know that things happened to her during the book that would make her a little startled, and naturally very upset, however, she was like this at the beginning. It felt like she was trying to be a victim. Unfortunately, she also did make me laugh with her inner dialogue at time, especially when she was slagging off Theodora. I actively despise Theodora’s character, I think she’s bitchy and fake and she reminds me of multiple people that I used to be friends with, so she’s a sore spot for me. Everyone else is either really boring or just not a good person, so that’s that. 

I realise I am moaning a lot about this book, but I actually genuinely really enjoyed reading it. I liked how easy it was to read, and I like the pure bizarreness of the characters, it just made it so fun to read. I was also quite a fan of the possessed theme that Eleanor was portraying, I’m quite a big fan of that and generally use it within my own writing, so I thought that was a neat addition. I like the fact, in some weird and twisted way, that the house drove her to the point where she had to resort to TW suicide, because it just makes the house all that more frightening. Also, upon discussing it with several of my peers in my seminar, I actually come to love the book more and find it even more intriguing! So, Eleanor is portrayed as a very unreliable narrator. It isn’t obvious in the beginning, but as the novel goes on, we realise that we can’t really trust a word she says. This is so important for the plot, as I now see it in a whole new light; that being that Eleanor could be making all of this up. This could be a representation for a whole matter of mental health issues, especially as it’s shown she grew up taking care of her mum. And now, her mum has come back and is now haunting her, and I’m not sure if that’s what Jackson was going for, but I find that so interesting. Not only that, but the writing style choices (how Jackson wrote a lot of Eleanor’s dialogue with repetition, so the dialogue changed when she felt her mum nearby) is so interesting, and, as a writer myself, I am quite the one to nerd out over these sorts of decisions. But yeah, I liked the book before, and liked it even more after analysing it, and would definitely recommend the read!