The Haunting of Hill House opens with the best paragraph in horror

Kind of horror: quiet, psychological, ambiguous. No gore, almost nothing shown.

Jackson’s novel follows four people invited to spend a summer in a house with a reputation. What follows may be a haunting. It may be one woman coming apart.

The opening

The first paragraph is routinely called the finest in the genre, and it earns it — a description of the house that manages to be about the nature of reality and sanity in about seventy words, ending on a clause that no reader forgets.

Read it in a bookshop. If it does nothing for you, the book will not either.

The ambiguity

The novel never confirms whether anything supernatural happens. Every event has a psychological reading available, and Jackson maintains both readings to the last line without collapsing either.

That is extremely difficult and almost nobody has repeated it successfully. Most ambiguous horror eventually tips its hand.

Eleanor

The novel is really about a woman in her thirties who has spent her adult life caring for a dying mother and has no self left. The house — or whatever is in it — offers her the first thing that has ever wanted her.

Read that way, the ending is not a horror ending at all. It is worse.

Who it is for

Anyone starting with horror. Short, beautifully written, no violence, and more frightening than anything with a body count.