the haunting of hill house shirley jackson book

The novel has been a significant influence on the horror genre, inspiring countless adaptations, imitations, and homages in literature and film. It means Eleanor.Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is a masterpiece of psychological horror that has stood the test of time since its publication in 1959. Hill House is, after all, a character in and of itself unlike the others, however, it remains utterly unchanged-only our understanding of what the final words mean changes. These lines repeat not on their own, but as the second half of a paragraph detailing what happens to the characters after the conclusion of the book. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, 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.” “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. The Haunting of Hill House concludes as it begins: The Last Line of The Haunting of Hill House

Perhaps, overall, the opening paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House should be taken as a warning.

That little piece of punctuation is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, telling us that, like Hill House itself, the language used to describe it is precise, deliberate, and just so. This could have been two sentences, but Shirley Jackson chose to make it one, with clauses separated by a semicolon. As for the last clause, this is a message: you are reading about a house that not only is a live, not only is not sane, but is, in fact, haunted. Dudley enforces quite adamantly throughout the book. However, it is laid out quite plainly here that the construction of Hill House is precise, deliberate that it is silent and that it quite prefers things just so-something that Mrs. Hill House is built very particularly and peculiarly we will learn later that its angles are all deliberately noneuclidean. “Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, 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.”

The haunting of hill house shirley jackson book