The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson: A Review

 "This house is full of stories we both told

These rooms the very stage where they unfold 

These walls, they whisper secrets and memories thereof 

But this door no longer leads us to that love"

Poets of the Fall ~ Skin

The author credited with the first detective story was Edgar Allan Poe and apart from the flair for the mysterious, he also was known for a short story called The Fall of the House of Usher which is clearly one of the influences of the book The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, so much so that the premise is eerily similar.

Three people get called to a mysterious house by an even more mysterious doctor who is supposedly researching paranormal phenomena that the house is known to have exhibited. The house, the eponymous Hill House, lies on the outskirts of the village of Hillsdale and  is despised by the locals and they do not talk about it. There is an air of mystery about the place and suspicions are rampant when Eleanor from the city comes to take up residence there for an experiment proposed by Dr. Montague. Bringing up the rear end of the party are Luke and Theodora. Eleanor, oftentimes referred to as Nell and Theodora, nicknamed Theo run slightly afoul of the caretaker Mrs Dudley whom I found to be most robotic in her duties. About midway through the book, Dr. Montague's wife shows up as does a man called Arthur who is a schoolmaster. Shirley Jackson uses this cast of characters to weave a psychological horror novel which is at times humorous and over the top and at times extremely creepy. Apparently the original owners of Hill House, the Crain family had a very tragic history, involving jealousy between the two sisters, a suicide and the discovery of a tome signed in the blood of the father.

As the novel progresses, the sense that the house does not want the people inhabiting it to be in it is made stronger and stronger. Little incidents happen- Theodora's clothes are ruined and someone writes Eleanor's name in chalk on one side of a wall. The whole message is "Eleanor help. Come home" or words to that effect. This creates suspense beautifully as everyone suspects Eleanor of being the one who wrote that sentence on the wall as an attention seeking gimmick.

Further, the doctor decrees that nobody is to wander around the house alone, but every time this happens something bad inevitably follows. Mrs. Montague for upon her appearance in the novel, immediately sits for planchette and declares there are spirits in the house. There is an almost delicious spookiness to the atmosphere that is created in this novel, as from the very beginning it seems as if the antagonist, the supernatural entity is basically Hill House itself.

While The Fall of the House of Usher had a legitimate ghost in it, Hill House does not...or does it? This point is left moot and up to the reader to conclude as incidents of hallucination, disembodied voices and body parts are used to up the ante and make people feel...I would not say scared, rather uneasy.

Is The Haunting of Hill House a book I enjoyed reading? Yes it is. Is it a book I would like to keep? They jury is unfortunately out on this one. I think The Haunting of Hill House does some things incredibly well but at times does not succeed in pulling it's own weight.

I give this book a 3.7/5  

Buy the book here

The Bilge Master

Florence Library: The Place of a Thousand Stories and Where My Story Began (A Guest Post by Kunal Bhattacharya)

 Kunal Bhattacharya is a dynamo of a kid I met in Bookline one day just by chance. We struck up a conversation and I was immediately impressed by the maturity in him. He was silent and he was listening, while me being me, I was blabbering.

 Since that day, Kunal and I have struck up an uncommonly rewarding friendship, whereupon he and I talk on a regular basis and have been moderating rooms on Clubhouse on weekends.

 Why should you care about Kunal? Let me show you something he wrote back in the day, that he nervously shared with me via WhatsApp. Let him speak, and let me step aside.

 The Bilge Master

 If there is one place that has shaped my childhood and made me into who I am today it would be the Florence Library in Alabama USA. I remember how my mom would drive me to the Library every Saturday and Sunday in our beat-up Plymouth Voyager. It was my only real source of entertainment since my dad was a struggling student and couldn’t afford a TV or a cable connection and our neighbourhood wasn’t the best for making friends, especially for a scrawny Asian kid who looked like a white boy. 

 The library was a magical place for me. You think you know the beauty of a library, but let me tell you that no library in India that I have visited can even hold a candle to Florence Library .

 The entire library floor was coved with carpets and for my 4-year-old self the shelves seemed impossibly tall. There was a special smell around the place, a smell that made you feel like this was where you truly belonged. My favourite part however, was the reading corner. There were massive indoor trees (artificial as I would later realise) under which were beanbags of every colour of the rainbow. They were a collage of greens, blues and reds which may seem garish to the eyes of an adult but to my 4-year-old self it was simply perfect.

 I would sit under the warm yellow light that the library seemed to be suffused with and lose myself in the world of Franklin the Turtle, Green Eggs and Ham and Bob the Builder. 

 When it was finally time to leave, I would beg my mother for just a few more minutes, clinging to her legs and crying. Sometimes she would give in and we would spend another few minutes that would turn into hours in that book filled utopia. 

 My love of books can be traced back to those hours spent in the library every weekend for 5 years. It must also be said that without my mother I probably would never have gotten into reading. While she had a hundred other things to do, she would always make time to drop me at the library every weekend. She would borrow 15 books every week from the library (the librarian undoubtedly bent a few rules to allow us to borrow that many) and over the week would read to me during breakfast, my evening soft boiled egg, dinner and right before bed. At that point my mom was pretty much supporting our family all alone since my dad would be in college most of the day. My mother still found the time to read to me.

 These daily sessions were undoubtedly where my bibliophile tendencies sprung from and they hold a special place in my heart. One of my greatest wishes is for me to one day be able to visit Florence Library again for it is a place of a thousand stories and where my story began.

 

You Only Hear the Music When Your Heart Begins to Break

 My Chemical Romance are back and I could not be happier. I was listening to Danger Days and I have to thank Anwesha for introducing me to the album properly. One song from that album that I adore is The Kids from Yesterday. I like it because it reminds me of the times I had and the line that makes me almost weep is the line in the title of this post.

I grew up surrounded by books and music. I grew up sheltered and  protected and as I grew up, my innocence left me. I lost my grandmother. I never knew my grandfather. Life hit hard and my heart kept breaking. But despite that, I found people. I found friends. I found family not related to me. Sometimes I found them in books, hiding in text. Sometimes I found them at the end of a song, because a person I met on the street liked Romeo and Juliet by Dire Straits more than me, for different reasons than me and we talked and we talked and we talked.

They say that the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb. I've found that is very true. My mom used to say that sometimes strangers give you more love than family ever can.

So this is for the covenant. This is for those people I think about when life gets a bit too much to take. This is just me knowing that I will suffer heartbreak and that you will pick up all the pieces, put them back together and maybe smash them...until such time that my broken pieces allow me to be whole.

And to the people I am going to meet, to the relationships yet to happen, to the tears yet to be shed and the jokes yet to be cracked...well, let's shed em together, lets crack em together and lets make a film about the ghosts together.

At least that is something to look forward to when your heart breaks, some music to let in, some healing to do and some strength to draw from.

To the people who made music when my heart broke, to the people who never gave up on me, to the people I don't say thank you to enough...I am glad that you make being a kid from yesterday bearable. One day, it will be one of the last rides I take, and I'll hold on tight and not look back! 

The Bilge Master

Haunted Houses

 It has been sporadic to say the least, because I was away for a while and took a vacation. You can find the details of the books I got on the trip here. 

The reason this post is titled Haunted Houses is because I just found out that the Porcupine Tree song Lazarus from their album Deadwing is about a mother who comes back from the dead, in the form of a specter to take her son with her to the place where people go when they die. You can check out my brief review of Deadwing here. Funnily enough, I am reminded of the lines from T.S. Eliot's poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock as I type this. 

So the thing is, I have been having some issues with mental health recently and I always take to pen and paper when I feel like this, so here I am back again to irritate you all, just as Lazarus came from the dead to say something to us all in the Bible and in Eliot's poem. I kind of feel like Lazarus myself right now, having renounced (or being in the process of renouncing) certain thought patterns, realizing certain habits had made me toxic and feeling overall a sense of guilt and shame. I had always bragged at the top of my voice that my mother never deserved a son like me. It was just the other day that I thought to myself for the first time that perhaps I could have been a better son, a more understanding son and suddenly that thought process has made me suddenly feel like a big weight is off my mind. I sort of feel like there is a lot for me to unlearn as opposed to learn, that I know very little of the people in the country that I live in and have lived as a national of for almost 30 years.

I do know that I do not want to enter my thirties with this kind of energy. And if you've got this far, allow me to quote from Cohen a little, when I say that 

"You see I'm just another snowman

Standing in the rain and sleet

Who loved you with his frozen love

His secondhand physique
With all he is and all he was
A thousand kisses deep"

 Now plenty of people tell me that there is a process I must adopt, that steps must be taken, but I am reminded of the saying that charity must begin at home and therefore I wish to focus on this unlearning. I do not want to be angry anymore, or scared, or insecure and I want to accept that I am not alone anymore, not really. 

And now you see why this post is truly titled Haunted Houses because the ghost is me, the house is my mind and the exorcist isn't coming. So perhaps, I must be the one to clean up my own messes and stop holding myself back, something that Zaraki was taught by Unohana.

I  had YouTube open as I wrote this and the song that's currently playing is the song my mother and I used to dance to when I had just discovered rock music properly- Queen's Radio Ga Ga.  

 Ma, I don't know where you are right now and I hope Chuni is with you and all the others you must have lost in your life, but hey I want you to know that I want to stop blaming you like I did all the time and I want to be a better human. I won't let your memory die, Ma. And so this last song that just came on, is for you, from me. Rest well, Ma

The Bilge Master

P.S. As I was typing out this post, somewhere in Romania, a close friend was tying out her first post on her blog and when it is ready for the Internet, it shall be shared on the Facebook page of this blog for all of us to enjoy! I just got reminded somehow that the Internet is so many things and I could feel her excitement in the texts she was sending me. Can we wish her a cheerful few pints of luck for the journey she is about to embark on please?