Book Notes: The Haunting of Hill House

The Haunting of Hill House is credited with being a founding book of the horror genre. It is an entertaining read, but I’m afraid it is also quite forgettable.

The story fell a little flat for me, and I was distracted by the sexist tropes (the unstable and weak young woman, the domineering clueless wife, the conflicted relationship between the female protagonists).

Book Highlights

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

He was scrupulous about the use of his title because, his investigations being so utterly unscientific, he hoped to borrow an air of respectability, even scholarly authority, from his education.

“People,” the doctor said sadly, “are always so anxious to get things out into the open where they can put a name to them, even a meaningless name, so long as it has something of a scientific ring.”

No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense.