With Halloween just around the corner, I thought I’d feature one the best horror novels I’ve ever read. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), is certainly the most influential haunted house tale of all time. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and has been made into two feature films (The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise, and its remake), a play, and is the basis of a Netflix series.

Jackson sets up a scary situation when a group of four supernatural phenomena researchers stay at a haunted house. The reader is confronted with the question: do ghosts really exist? The researchers all perceive the haunted house in different ways with plenty of dread and horror.

In 2018, The New York Times polled 13 writers to choose the scariest book of fiction they have ever read, and Carmen Maria Machado and Neil Gaiman both chose The Haunting of Hill House. You can add me to that list! Are you a fan of Shirley Jackson? GRADE: A