The Haunting of Hill House

Dear Reader,

A few weeks ago, we passed the 75th anniversary of the publication of Shirley Jackson’s (1916-1965) essential short story, “The Lottery.” Jackson was a California native, who settled on the East Coast after her husband—the writer and critic Stanley Edgar Hyman—took a job at Bennington College in Vermont. Both Jackson and Hyman had been regular contributors to The New Yorker, but “The Lottery” attracted significant attention upon its publication and solidified Jackson’s reputation as a master of the craft.

If you haven’t read it, “The Lottery” describes a seemingly idyllic rural American town that, once a year, holds a drawing to choose a member of the community for a ritual sacrifice. However interesting that sounds, the real strength of the story comes from Jackson’s writing, which conceals the grisly nature of the lottery until the very end, and instead painstakingly describes the bucolic setting and the banal interactions of the townspeople (as they prepare to murder one of their own).

While “The Lottery” put Jackson on the proverbial map, her precise style reached full maturity in the 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House. For this issue, I wanted to excerpt the story’s opening paragraph in its entirety:

Background

The Haunting of Hill House was a finalist for the National Book Award and, since its publication, has consistently been ranked as one of the great literary works of the 20th century. The novel follows four characters, who visit the reportedly haunted Hill House to try to find evidence of the supernatural (sort of like a 1950s version of Ghost Hunters). While all four experience strange occurrences and ghostly phenomena, the events are described in vague and oblique terms—much like the lottery—which makes them scarier but also subject to varying interpretations. Indeed, as the novel progresses, one character in particular seems to be either losing her mind or growing more sensitive to the house’s paranormal activity. The novel closes much as it opens, with Hill House, and whatever walks there, walking alone among the hills.

What It Offers

This short paragraph is—in my opinion—the best opening to any novel ever. What I love best is how many “rules” Jackson breaks to get the exact effect she wants. First, the opening sentence gives us no indication as to what this story is about. It opens no doors and leaves the reader confused. (Compare it to the opening of To Kill a Mockingbird: “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow….”) And within that first sentence there is the odd choice of using “larks and katydids” as examples, which is problematic because—unless you’re an ornithologist or entomologist—they’re probably unfamiliar objects of comparison. Then there are the semicolons (one in each sentence seems like overkill), the adverbs (which any half-decent writing guide says to limit or cut altogether), the repetitive use of “hill(s)” (Jackson must not have a thesaurus), and of course the last comma between “there” and “walked” (unnecessary and, according to most grammatists, incorrect).

Even with all these issues, however, the opener works perfectly. With every word, you feel the ominous effect of Jackson’s language. You feel that sense of foreboding. You feel Hill House stalking alone in the dark, in the night. You feel the pressure of unrelenting reality and the omnipresent threat of insanity. And you’re drawn in.

Truman Capote once said that “the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.” I think that’s what Jackson is attuned to here. She’s certainly aware of all of the rules, and, if you read a lot of her work, she abides by them most of the time. But on certain occasions, like the paragraph above, Jackson trusts her instincts and follows her ear, understanding that, by translating the music directly, she can better follow the Prime Directive that overrides all others in fiction writing: make the reader want to read more.

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