Day 10

Before we get to the actual haunting, I want to pause for just a moment to consider the novel’s pacing. (See what I did there?) We’re just over halfway through: the end of the fourth of nine chapters. Jackson has spent all this time setting the scene, preparing the characters—and the reader—for the second half of the book. I was surprised by some of the comments about the slow pace—my own feeling is that Hill House is a page-turner. But readers who are expecting something more like Stephen King probably find it harder to wait this long for bona fide supernatural happenings to start.

Structurally, the book is interesting in a way I hadn’t really picked up on before sketching out the reading schedule for this book club. Longer chapters with multiple parts—up to eight parts in chapter eight—are interspersed with shorter chapters that may have only one part (chapter two, three, six) or a few (chapter five, seven). From a craft standpoint, it’s an interesting choice, also, to delay the first supernatural manifestation until the end of a long chapter rather than using it to open the next one.

We now see just how firmly Eleanor is stuck in the world of her mother. “I’m here, what is it?” Eleanor says at first to Theodora, in the tone she must have used when her mother called her during the night. And then she repeats “What is it?” in a whisper. I love the way Jackson uses an identical phrase in two such different ways.

“That’s all,” she says in response to Theodora telling her something is knocking on the doors. That’s all? Something unknown—something unseen—is banging on the doors, and Eleanor’s first reaction is relief: that’s all. Because whatever it is, it’s not her mother.

Again, to show fear, Jackson shows us the characters huddling closer together. Against the fear, but also against the cold that “starts in your stomach and goes in waves around and up and down again like something alive.”

And again, laughter is the defense against fear.

“Someone knocked on the door with a cannon ball and then tried to get in and eat us, and started laughing its head off when we wouldn’t open the door. But nothing really out of the way,” Theodora says.

In essence, the same story as the one we just read—condensed and ironized for public consumption.

What do you make of the thing Dr. Montague saw—or thinks he saw—run down the hall? Or his idea that the house wants to separate them?