I watched every bit of media I could find about this book that wasn't the Liam Neeson adaptation (and I'd like for it to remain that way). I've watched video essays about the differences in adaptations and about haunted houses, read the review at the beginning of my copy full to the brim with spoilers and someone else's thoughts on the matter.

But I still can't wrap my head around it.

I suppose that was the intention, wasn't it.

In all regards, The Haunting of Hill House was a character study– as I'm sure most things are– but this one is specifically is about Eleanor Vance and how her fear of loneliness drove her to toxic dependency on an amoral concept of a house that wants nothing but to possess her. Literally and figuratively.

Despite this, The Haunting of Hill House is a poem. It contains poetry and songs, sure– The Grattan Murders, the verses from Twelfth Night that Eleanor sings again and again as a reassurance, a sort of mantra or prayer– but its events rely on these repetitions as well. Its prose is deceptively simple and builds up and up until the climax of Eleanor's stay in the house. It states that a house, Hill House– a structure made by Hugh Crain about a century prior to the book's events– has intent and emotion.

Jackson telling me that, through the bookended narrations opening and ending this novel, doesn't convince me of its reality anymore than the characters' insistence of it. How likely is a house built by someone else to be malicious towards people who it was not made for? How much of these views belong to the characters themselves or were impressed upon them to soothe their skepticisms? Dr. Montague said it best after their first event:

“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. ”

Because they do believe that the house is doing these unexplainable things, these experiences that only four of them can experience. And collectively, they believe that because the house is doing it, the house must be malicious. But is it? “No ghost in all the long histories of ghosts has ever hurt anyone physically. The only damage done is by the victim to himself," the doctor said.

But, suppose we take Jackson's statements bookending the novel another way. “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality,” it says, and Hill House is, decidedly, not sane, inferring that the house itself is alive.

That doesn't denote malice either. And throughout the book, you see it reflected on Eleanor because, again, this book is about her. In fleshing out Eleanor's social anxiety and deep insecurity and inferiority complex and fear of alienation, and the ambiguity of that being the house's influence on her versus how she generally just is, you can see that nothing Eleanor thinks, she thinks out of malice. And nothing she does is either. It's out of an urgent need to belong, to grieve, to become. She dreams often in order to escape her own absolute reality, of being solitary but not lonely (nestled in an orchard of oleander), of having her creativity (her cup of stars), of having protection (her stone lions), and of being loved and taken care of (her wanting to come home with Theodora).

The night after she surrenders to the house, the night before she comes home, she enters the library she says smelled of death and decay. Every time the door to it opens, she calls out to her mother, who she found dead after passing in the night, so she would know, wouldn't she? And the house(?) beckons her. She runs up and up and up to the top of the tower, running away (she was good at that, Theo had said) in a fit of warmth and elation, embodying the hauntings the four of them had been experiencing, feeling like the mornings after a haunting, and the narration takes up like the reverse of a bad dream, as Luke says.

Like the narration is telling it back over and over to ensure us that it did happen, that it was happening. Only, all of them were witnessing it, experiencing it too, so it must be real.

The Haunting of Hill House is a study on Eleanor Vance's view of her own self. Someone unfit to house children, someone whose valuables are quarreled over by sisters, someone nestled apart from everyone else. Altogether unwelcoming upon first glance– abandoned and only barely hospitable– but so very, desperately, lonely to belong to someone.

Content Warnings

Enter Title Here by Naomi Kanakia

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challenging dark emotional informative tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

Content Warnings

Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

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emotional funny hopeful inspiring fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

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emotional hopeful lighthearted reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

This book reads like a dated children's movie that feels as whimsical as Klaus and tries very hard to be progressive. It's been touted as a YA novel and as difficult as some of these topics might be for more children, marking it for YA while having older white men as protagonists seems like a stretch. At best, it's middle grade.

I appreciate its blunt cartoonish-ness though, it suspends your disbelief for a while. An orphanage for difficult, magical children visited by a dull, old caseworker who does his best to do right by them. His world gets a little less dull when meeting the unorthodox orphanage at Marsyas and its owner (or, master, however weird that sounds on paper). It writes itself like a rom-com, and it kind of is. A really cartoonish, quirky, and charming rom-com with a lot of little kids running around.

I found myself growing to like this book even after the initial chapters. It was slow-going at first, and the turn wasn't as subtle as it was fast. The narration itself wanting both to put us in Linus' head (especially in cases of extreme anxiety) while also keeping us out of it (in this case, when he starts warming up to the children).

A little nitpick of mine while reading this book was that I couldn't place its time period or place. It deems itself to be placed in the South but the speech patterns for some were suggestively British. There are scenes where it suggests that it is set in the present (record stores telling one of the children that they liked old music and the existence of computers), but Linus still has to send correspondences and reports through the post and if it were placed in America, the speech patterns would also suggest that this would technically be a period piece on top of its magical realism.

It all comes to a head during the later chapters, when Arthur and Linus talk about how Arthur is the first magical being to ever have run their own orphanage and that he was silenced and prohibited from revealing it. Holding the suggestion that of all the years these institutions have existed not a single activist group had arisen. Linus talks of magical beings in professional roles but says nothing of activist groups or names any.

Again, this is a cartoonish rom-com of a children's-not-YA book banking on the fiction of a fake marginalized group, but so maybe expecting it to be a little less like that would be disingenuous. The criticism exists though.

Here, on the other hand are some very problematic things I found about it:

That the concept of children in homes like these were allegorical to the abduction and institutionalization of Indigenous children is a tad concerning, seeing as there is not a single child of color.
There's a lot of rampant fatphobia in this book, coming from the narrative character and the people he used to work with.
There were a lot of Whoopi Epiphany Speeches that kind of feel awkward.
We also have a Black woman who fulfills a caretaker role
and is a being of magic
, and though the book doesn't treat her badly, one should be mindful of the fallings of tropes like these.

Overall, despite its flaws, it's a cheesy rom-com of a book that reads like a dated children's movie on the vein of Klaus and maybe a bit of The Parent Trap. It is what it is and despite all of that, is kind of stronger than the sum of its parts.

Content Warnings

Fat Chance, Charlie Vega by Crystal Maldonado

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challenging emotional hopeful inspiring reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Content Warnings

Fortune Favors the Dead by Stephen Spotswood

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adventurous emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I don't even know how I found this one but when I recommended it, I didn't think I'd like it so much. I've never really been much for noir, a bit too gritty, a little too hopeless. The funny thing about putting a mindful queer eye on the proceedings is that it tends to bashing all the hopelessness out of things, which is pretty amazing.

This book did that, with Detective Willowjean Parker assisting Detective Lillian Pentecost on the case of Abigail Collins' murder. It covered topics like violence against women, homophobia during the 50s, poverty, and a lot more. It's not a hard book to read, but definitely not for the faint of heart.

It was definitely worth the read. Not as pulpy as I thought it'd be, but definitely a little cartoonish on some fronts. I mean, c'mon, a traveling ex-carnie bisexual detective? Think about it.

Though, I do think more thought put towards POC could have been considered, since this tackled a lot of things that touches on the lives of POC at the time. I pointed this out in my notes but I'm pretty sure that at the time the case is set in, Japanese people were in internment camps and the most we get of mentions of non-White American goings-on was mostly to point out that this was post-World War II.

I would have hated seeing anything mishandled, but to say that these things weren't relevant during the time this was set in, especially in a city like New York, it will have been impossible to miss it even in passing. I was reading along to the audiobook (Kirsten Potter's reading was fantastic despite minor hiccups), so I'm pretty sure I didn't miss any indicators that any of the cast of characters were POC. Almost all of them were some shade of white, though I'd love to imagine that Graham Hollis wasn't.

Content Warnings

Slaughterhouse by Yves Olade

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emotional reflective fast-paced

5.0

I love Yves Olade's writing. Highly recommend. I've gushed about all of his poems so many times. I feel like every time I reread it I end up crying.

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stubbornjerk's reviews 113 reviews

stubbornjerk's reviews
113 reviews