The modern king of horror literature, Stephen King, wrote in his work on the genre, “Danse Macabre,” that there were “were only two great novels of the supernatural” in the modern era: Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” (1896) and Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” (1959). Both novels, in addition to being chilling, thrilling reads, invite readers to probe the loss of family and the twisting of the natural desire to replace this loss.
‘The Haunting of Hill House’: Failure of a Fake Family
Both James’s and Jackson’s stories feature estates that loom like huge corpses; each lacks a family as its soul. This is most obvious in “The Haunting of Hill House,” because it’s the house itself that sets the plot into motion.A professor of anthropology, whose real passion is the study of the uncanny, convinces three young people to share life at a haunted house with him for a few weeks. One is the presumptive to the estate, a handsome young man. One is an artistic beauty, and one is Eleanor Vance, a woman who has been frustrated her entire adult life. These characters serve as a composite of acquaintances: a fake family.
