Description:

A stunningly creepy deluxe hardcover edition with spot gloss, black sprayed edges, black-stained pages, and black endpapers. Part of a six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by Academy Award-winning director of The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro. Filmmaker and longtime horror literature fan Guillermo del Toro serves as the curator for the Penguin Horror series, a new collection of classic tales and poems by masters of the genre. Included here are some of del Toro’s favorites, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ray Russell’s short story “Sardonicus,” considered by Stephen King to be “perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written,” to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and stories by Ray Bradbury, Joyce Carol Oates, Ted Klein, and Robert E. Howard. Featuring original cover art by Penguin Art Director Paul Buckley, these stunningly creepy deluxe hardcovers will be perfect additions to the shelves of horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and paranormal aficionados everywhere. The Haunting of Hill House The classic supernatural thriller by an author who helped define the genre. First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a “haunting;' Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers—and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

Review

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality,” Shirley Jackson’s novel begins, “even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” That first sentence, one of the most quietly annihilating sentences in American fiction, does not merely set a mood. It issues a philosophical claim: sanity is a fragile membrane stretched over a reality the mind cannot face, and whatever Hill House is, it lives on the far side of that membrane. Jackson’s 1959 classic is generally described as a ghost story, a haunted-house novel, a psychological thriller. But to read it that way is to miss what gives it its terrible staying power. The Haunting of Hill House is a narrative about a woman who has been so thoroughly hollowed out by the small cruelties of family and the long corrosion of loneliness that when the house finally reaches for her, she misrecognizes its claim as love. Her destruction is the story’s horror, but the novel’s deeper, almost unbearable insight is that she collaborated in it—because the hunger to belong can become the very thing that eats you.

The book is built around an investigation. Dr. John Montague, an anthropologist with a library of psychical research cases and a weary, gentlemanly confidence in rational method, rents Hill House for a summer to study its reported manifestations. He assembles three assistants, all of whom have histories of contact with the uncanny: Eleanor Vance, a thirty-two-year-old woman who spent eleven years nursing an invalid mother and was once at the center of a poltergeist stone-throwing; Theodora, a sharp, self-possessed young woman whose telepathic ability was documented in laboratory card-guessing tests; and Luke Sanderson, the feckless heir to the house, foisted on the project by a family that thinks a haunted mansion will discipline him. Together they form a giddy, mock-family camaraderie, using the little parlor as their base and dressing up their interactions in elaborate role-playing. But the house is never a passive specimen. From the first night it makes itself felt: a cold spot so deliberate it seems to want to give each of them an unpleasant shock; pounding that travels the upstairs hall; a phantom dog the doctor and Luke chase to nowhere; and, unmistakably, messages that target only one person.

“HELP ELEANOR COME HOME,” chalked along the wall of the hallway. Days later, the green room’s wallpaper smeared with a red substance—blood or paint, one never learns—and the same plea: “HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR.” The house, whatever else it may be, is an addressor, and Eleanor is the one it writes to. Jackson takes enormous care to make these communications corporately perceptible: the others see the messages, feel the cold, hear the pounding and the inhuman laughter that follows. Yet everything circles Eleanor. The early poltergeist events—knocking on doors, the smashing of inanimate objects—recall the stone-throwing incident of her childhood, which Dr. Montague has already flagged as a possible indicator that she carries an unconscious psychokinetic capacity. He warns the group that poltergeists are “primitively destructive but mindless forces” that feed on the living, and her own behavior begins to oscillate between childlike delight and odd dissociative speeches about the dissolution of the self. The novel builds the question with exquisite patience: is Hill House an evil, sentient building that has selected Eleanor as its victim, or is Eleanor projecting the haunting outward from the wreckage of her own mind—and can the line ever be drawn?

Jackson refuses to answer, and the refusal is the source of the book’s power. Free indirect discourse binds the narration so tightly to Eleanor’s consciousness that the reader can never step outside her perceptions to certify what is real. When she and Theodora walk the path outside at night and the world turns, for a few terrifying minutes, into a photographic negative—black path, white trees, a hallucinatory picnic of a family with a puppy—Theodora sees something behind them and screams “Run!” but will not describe it, and the novel never discloses it. When Eleanor lies alone on the hillside in a trance of happiness, hearing a voice call her name and feeling something hold her gently, the others insist they were calling her all along, but her account and theirs do not match. And in the masterstroke set-piece of the planchette séance, Dr. Montague’s wife, a domineering spiritualist who treats the supernatural as a kind of domestic appliance, receives automatic writing for “Eleanor Nellie Nell Nell”—a child wanting “Home” and “Mother,” both “Lost. Lost. Lost.”—making explicit the psychological content the house has been working with all along. Mrs. Montague, with her patronizing “perfect love,” never perceives that the forces she summons might not be benevolent, and the house’s most violent manifestation—a shaking that throws the doctor, Theodora, and Eleanor about the room—follows directly from her spiritual arrogance.

Yet even during that cataclysm, the moment that seals Eleanor’s fate is not the violence itself but her response. “I’ll come,” she says aloud, and the shaking stops. She has surrendered, and from then on she begins to belong to the house in a way that is no longer distinguishable from belonging in it. She hears a children’s singing game no one else hears. She walks the halls at night, dancing in the drawing room, taunting her friends, and finally climbs the rotted iron stairs of the tower where the companion is said to have hanged herself, hammering on the trapdoor at the top. When the group brings her down, she offers only a bland, dissociated alibi: “I came down to the library to get a book.” The doctor, gentle and apologetic, decides she must leave. But Eleanor has now hollowed out what little self she brought with her. Her fantasy life—the cozy apartment, the white cat, the cup of stars painted inside—is revealed, in a devastating final confession, to be entirely invented: “No home,” she says. “Only a carton in the back of my car.” Her sister’s car, stolen to come here. The address back to a world she has never lived in means nothing.

Jackson’s circle closes with a deliberateness that amounts to a philosophical statement. The novel’s final paragraph is virtually identical to its first: “Hill House, not sane, stood 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.” Return is the only possible end because escape has always been a mirage. Eleanor’s earlier assurance—that she would take Theodora home with her, that they would live in the apartment with the cup of stars—collapsed at the quiet brutality of Theodora’s “Do you always go where you’re not wanted?” and Eleanor’s own answer, “I’ve never been wanted anywhere.” The phrase “Journeys end in lovers meeting,” the line from Twelfth Night that Eleanor has been singing to herself from the beginning, mutates through the novel from a romantic promise into a death wish. Her final drive into the tree is not an accident but a consummation—the lovers meeting she has been journeying toward, the home that wanted her.

What makes the novel more than a gothic exercise is the merciless way it grounds the supernatural in the ordinary barnacles of human attachment. Jackson embeds a long documentary history—Hugh Crain’s scrapbook of hellfire illustrations and paternal warnings, the feuding Crain sisters who quarreled over gold-rimmed dishes and a house that absorbed their mutual hatred—as an overture to Eleanor’s own story. The dead mother who appears as knocking on the wall, the older sister who demands the car back, the little girl who wanted a cup of stars and would not accept the ordinary cup: these are not symbolic flourishes, they are the raw materials of a life that has never been allowed to individuate. Dr. Montague’s lecture on the house’s history mentions that Hugh Crain built every angle slightly off-center, producing a “masterpiece of architectural misdirection.” The phrase describes both the building and the mind it hosts. Just as the doors swing shut on their own and the floor tilts so that no one can quite stand straight, Eleanor’s psyche has been warped by small guilts, small reproaches, and an unending sense of fault over her mother’s death—the mother she could not save and, the planchette implies, can never escape. “Mother. Lost. Lost. Lost.” The house, Luke remarks, is a “mother house,” an engulfing womb that will “consume us, take us into itself,” and Eleanor’s surrender literalizes that metaphor. She is not merely a victim but a participant in her own dissolution, because the only intimacy she recognizes is possession.

In the landscape of mid-century ghost fiction, Jackson’s novel occupies an unusual position. It inherits the physical nastiness of M.R. James’s antiquarian horrors—the phantom dog, the clammy cold spot, the thing that holds Eleanor’s hand in the darkness—and the comic-exposé structure of Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost,” which Dr. Montague invokes when he worries that a poltergeist can overshadow a more interesting manifestation. But Jackson strips the genre of its social texture and replaces it with the raw sensation of a consciousness coming apart. The investigators are not heroes; they are quarantined, untethered from ordinary life, and the doctor’s rationalism, for all its charm, is so powerless that the novel finally has to acknowledge that the mind, far from being invulnerable, is precisely what the supernatural invades. His wife’s planchette séance, with its farcical combination of spiritualist jargon and petty domestic tyranny, satirizes the ghost-hunting enterprise without entirely dismissing it—the house does respond to her, just not in the way she expects. The result is a novel that belongs simultaneously to the gothic, to the psychological ghost story, and to a tradition of existential dread that says the worst thing that can happen to a person is not a monster but the removal of the consoling fictions she has built to survive. That the book was published in the same era that saw the rise of Borley Rectory and Ballechin House as vernacular legend gives its frame of psychical research an almost documentary feel, but Jackson uses that frame to expose its limits: no amount of measurement will explain why Eleanor loves the house that is killing her.

The novel is not without its coldnesses. Luke, for all that he supplies the romantic-comedy lightness and the offhand remark that “I never had a mother,” remains a cipher—the doctor’s suggestion that his strength comes from a “catlike instinct for self-preservation” is a diagnosis that never deepens. Theodora is more vividly drawn, her ambiguous attachment to Eleanor carrying genuine erotic charge and genuine cruelty, but she ultimately functions as a foil whose refusal to be consumed is what Eleanor cannot tolerate. Dr. Montague’s long narrative monologues, while atmospheric, at times feel like expositional scaffolding that the novel would rather shed. And for readers who want an unambiguous supernatural resolution, the book’s central evasion can register as a cheat. But Jackson’s design is rigorous: the ambiguity is the argument. The haunting cannot be located because the self cannot be located—and the self that Eleanor never fully possessed was always already a composite of other people’s demands, other people’s guilts, a mother’s ghost that walked in her long before Hill House ever called her name.

What endures is the voice. Jackson’s prose moves between luminous interior monologue and a kind of cool, almost forensic observation, and the shifts mark the distance between Eleanor’s inner life and the world’s refusal to see it. “I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster,” she thinks on her first night in the blue room, “and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.” The image is repellently intimate, but it is also, for Eleanor, the closest thing to being held. That perversion of the desire to be known is the book’s true terror. The Haunting of Hill House is not about what walks in the dark. It is about what happens when a person discovers that obliteration can feel like home—and that no one, however well-intentioned, can call you back from a place you have already chosen.

It is a book for readers who can tolerate a horror that offers no catharsis, who are willing to sit inside a mind as it dismantles itself, and who recognize that the deepest dread is not being afraid of something but being afraid of nothing—of the void where a self should be. It earns its place not as a superior potboiler but as a literary achievement that makes the reader complicit in its central question: whether Eleanor was ever free to leave, or whether the house was just the last in a long line of places that had already claimed her.