Episode 53: The Haunting of Hill House

We continue Halloween 2020 with Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House! We talk about Women Who Are A Problem, sexuality, what the f*ck a pompous spiritualist is doing just showing up for no reason, space and home, and the haunted house genre. Basically, everybody who wrote a horror novel in the second half of the 20th century loves the shit out of this novel, so thanks Shirley Jackson, now we have Ira Levin who also rules.

For more on the haunted house, we recommend William Gleason’s Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature. We always recommend reading more Shirley Jackson, particularly her other major novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Carmen Maria Machado has an interview about the novel in The Atlantic, in which she says, “the ‘friendship’ between Theodora and Eleanor in The Haunting of Hill House is unmistakably some of the gayest shit I’ve ever read,” which is just true. And of course go back and listen to our episode on “The Lottery”!

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.