I have just finished THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, which has been acclaimed as one of the finest examples of the haunted house genre. I haven't read much haunted house literature, but I did very much like this novel. It derives its terror, not from the events of the book, but from the uneasy feeling that you really don't know what events are real and which aren't. Apparently the director of the first film adaptation originally thought it was a story about the main character Eleanor's descent into insanity, but Jackson corrected him that it was in fact a ghost story.
While the beginning of the novel---which spends what feels like at least a dozen pages on Eleanor's journey from the city to the eponymous Hill House---goes slowly, it becomes clear later on that this is all character development for her. She is a daydreamer, a lost soul, and that turns out to be her undoing.
There are other characters in this novel too: Theodora, a queer-coded bohemian woman who becomes fast friends, then something like enemies to Eleanor; Luke, who will inherit the house and comes along to appease his aunt the owner; the Dudleys, cantankerous caretakers; Dr. Montague, who brought them all there; and finally Mrs. Montague and Arthur, who come later in the story. All of these are at turns friendly and pitying and wicked to Eleanor, but I don't think any of them actually see her for who she is. In fact, I'm not sure if the reader is really given to see who Eleanor is outside of who she is at Hill House---but that is the purpose of the book.
The story is so internal to Eleanor's experiences that, as I said above, it's hard to tell what is and isn't real. That internality, paired with the repetition of certain phrases---"Journeys end in lovers meeting," for example, is a particular refrain---lends an air of uncanniness to the whole affair. In all it's a deeply unsettling book, which I'm not sure I would call "horror," maybe because I have been led to believe that horror denotes jumpscares and body horror and demonic possession. THE HAUNTING AT HILL HOUSE could be a particularly bad dream---though of course, a bad dream can be scarier than any movie or ghost story, especially when you're inside it.
I have tried to avoid spoilers in the review above, but I have spoiled it a little. I'm not going to change anything, however, for two reasons: one, the book has been out for over seventy years and really, there is a statute of limitations on spoiler expectations; two, this is a book that I think will only improve with a re-read, where you already know what happens.
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