The Haunting of Hill House

The Obsessive Diary - 23rd June

I’ve decided to read The Haunting of Hill House in the morning, not at night. It is too frightening. This, the mark of greatness. Shirley Jackson. She taught Stephen King how to do it. I feel I’ve been gearing up for this book. Gathering my senses and my strength. Learn from me, she says, as she frightens me half to death. Yesterday when I began it I had the sudden feeling that it contained a darkness that would seep from the pages once opened, a book that contained a curse, that it should not be read at all. I had the feeling that I should close it like the doors at Hill House. Yet like Eleanor, the protagonist, I am compelled to stay. Shirley Jackson, who tapped into a seam that gave her The Lottery and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I wonder, if like Stephen King on finishing the first draft of Pet Sematary, she locked the manuscript in a drawer, convinced it should never be let out. I wonder if she was haunted.