Qlimax 2017 | D-Block & S-te-Fan

dec 14 Shirley Jackson's birthday

Her novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959) is a highly regarded example of the haunted house story, and was described by Stephen King as one of the important horror novels of the twentieth century. This contemporary updating of the classic ghost story has a vivid and powerful opening paragraph:

"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. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."