The haunting of Hill House

Quite possibly, I'm being unfair to this book just because I liked We Have Always Lived in the Castle so much, that anything was bound to fall short after that. The Haunting of Hill House is a well-executed horror story (yeah, I know, milestone in the genre, bla bla), thoroughly classic, and perhaps that's why I didn't find as memorable

The premise is that four strangers spend a week in a haunted house, determined to find out what is going on. The start is quite slow-paced, and when, finally, mysterious, creepy things begin to happen, they go hand in hand with the unraveling of human relations, and/or the lucidity of the protagonist (is for the reader to figure out which one of the two)

What makes this book stand out are the characters. Each were so different and written so well. This is particularly difficult for writers and Jackson really nailed it

It seems strange to review a universally hailed classic, but here it is: this is a truly, deeply unsettling novel. Apart from the ghost story, the social horror they Jackson also brought to The Lottery is what gets under the skin. How much of Eleanor's story is real? How much of Eleanor herself is real?

The doubt is as pervasive as the dread, and the dread runs very deep.