CRAFT ESSAY - Scary Stuff

Craft Essay #12

The Haunting of Hill House

vs.

The Shining

Scary Stuff

What makes a novel scary? Is it simply a matter of putting people in a remote house and letting loose the ghosts? Or does it require a delicate balance of language, character development and plotting? This essay will examine two classics of the horror genre—Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Stephen King’s The Shining—with a focus on their differences and similarities.

The Haunting of Hill House opens with one of the creepiest first paragraphs ever

written:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. (p. 3)

Here the narrator is immediately established as scientifically knowledgeable (with phrases such as “live organism”) and distantly authoritative (the house is “not sane”). The brief description of Hill House, like the descriptions of characters to come, does not so much paint a visual picture as a psychological one: the house “stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within.” In fact, throughout the novel the house is treated as a character, with feelings and motivations (when Eleanor first sees the house, on page 25, it appears to be “looking down over her”; on page 41, the house “steadied and located” its four occupants). Finally, there is that spine-tingling last sentence that sets the stage for the thrills to come.

Contrast this with the brief opening paragraph of The Shining:

“Jack Torrance thought: officious little prick.”

The omniscient third-person narrator, here closely aligned with Jack, goes on to describe Mr. Ullman, the manager of the demon-infested Overlook Hotel. While there are plenty of chills in the chapters that follow, this scene could take place at any office between a new employee and his self-important boss. Unlike Jackson, King is in no hurry to introduce us to the malevolent spirits of the Overlook (the Torrance family doesn’t even arrive there until page 72), though he does allow Ullman to relate the grisly tale of Grady, the caretaker who murdered his family there (pp. 9-10). Grady’s bloody spree is blamed on alcoholism and cabin fever, but we know better: horror story convention dictates that Jack, himself a recovering alcoholic, will also give in to violent impulses when his inner demons (already hinted at by his hostile attitude toward Ullman) meet the supernatural forces of the Overlook Hotel.

Both novels feature a limited cast of characters. In The Shining, there is very little visual description of Jack, his wife, Wendy, and their son, Danny. Their characters emerge via the omniscient narrator, who relates their thoughts, actions and dialogue—e.g., Wendy’s scene with Danny on page 13, which establishes her sense of dread about Jack and his new job, and also flashes back to Jack’s checkered past as a father. The Haunting of Hill House follows a similar pattern, though the third-person narrator in this case is limited to one character, Eleanor, whose neuroses, like Jack’s, will arouse the ill-will of the local spirits. Physical descriptions are even more sparse. As with the house, the narrator instead zeroes in on the psychological:

Eleanor Vance was thirty-two years old when she came to Hill House. The only other person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister…She could not remember ever being truly happy in her life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair. (p. 3)

We need not know what Eleanor looks like, perhaps because Hill House doesn’t really care; it only cares about the weakness at her emotional core.

Perhaps the most noticeable difference between the two novels—other than their lengths (The Haunting clocks in at less than 200 pages, vs. The Shining’s 500-plus)—is the use of language. Jackson lards her descriptions with details designed to invoke anxiety. On page 19 alone, while Eleanor drives her “little car” from Boston to Hill House, she encounters “unattractive hills,” “thick, oppressive trees,” a “vicious rock,” and an “ominous scraping.” And when she finally arrives, she is met by a “tall and ominous and heavy gate.”

The journey to the Overlook Hotel in The Shining is also anxiety-ridden, but this is established in a different way. The narrator, aligned here with Danny, is limited to the five-year-old’s point of view. Thus, the descriptions are simple and display a sense of wonder: “On the tallest of [the mountains] you could see a fine dusting of snow, which Daddy said was there year-round” (p. 67). Initially, the dread of this scene is communicated solely through the mother’s fear that their old VW Beetle will not make it up the mountain, and Jack’s irritation at her fretting. The subtext of this domestic squabble is that this journey will bring violence and death. At one point, perhaps to fit in a poetic sense of doom that Danny’s point of view can’t handle, the narrator shifts from Danny’s limited perspective to Wendy’s more sophisticated one: “She saw a waterfall spilling over…the early afternoon sun sparkling in it like a golden fish snared in a blue net” (p. 68). But then the chapter ends with Danny recognizing the hotel as the place he’s seen in his visions: “the dark and booming place where some hideously familiar figure sought him down long corridors…It was here. It was here…” (p. 71).

The authors’ different styles are also evident in the more frightening scenes. On Eleanor’s second night at Hill House, she and Theodora wake up terrified by sounds coming from the hallway just outside the bedroom door (p. 93-99). Moving back and forth from simple, expository dialogue (“Something is knocking on the doors,” Theodora says) to Eleanor’s thoughts and feelings (“Is this what they mean by cold chills going up and down your back?” she asks herself), the narrator skillfully builds the terror. The two women try to convince themselves that something rational is happening even as the pounding arrives at their door and “the sickening, degrading cold came in waves from whatever was outside.” From there, Jackson ratchets it up: “Little pattings came from around the doorframe, small seeking sounds, feeling the edges of the door, trying to sneak a way in.” Even when these awful noises stop, and we are relieved (if wrung out), the author throws in another spooky element: while Eleanor and Theodora were being terrorized in their room, the two male occupants of the house, ostensibly the strong, sensible ones, were outside chasing what they thought was a dog. “Doesn’t it begin to seem,” one of them says, “that the intention is, somehow, to separate us?”

In The Shining, when Danny enters room 217, which he’s been warned against doing by the hotel’s clairvoyant cook, the terrifying scene unfolds through the boy’s eyes (pp. 241-3). Entering the bathroom, he finds the shower curtain closed, and hopes that behind it “he would perhaps see something nice…something Daddy had forgotten or Mommy had lost, something that would make them both happy—

So he pulled the curtain back.

The woman in the tub had been dead for a long time. She was bloated and purple, her gas-filled belly rising out of the cold, ice-rimmed water like some fleshy island. Her eyes were fixed on Danny’s, glassy and huge, like marbles. She was grinning, her purple lips pulled back in a grimace. Her breasts lolled. Her pubic hair floated. Her hands were frozen on the knurled porcelain sides of the tub like crab claws.

This scene derives its power from visual description—those glassy eyes, that bloated belly—and an identification with Danny painstakingly constructed over the previous 242 pages. For my money, however, Jackson’s scene, while also descriptive (if aurally, rather than visually) and built upon a firm psychological foundation, is more terrifying. Her language is sharp, even hard, compared with King’s rather plain (and sometimes passive) language. In Jackson’s scene, the cold is “degrading,” the ghosts at the door make “small seeking sounds.” The author also uses poetic repetition in a weirdly threatening way: Eleanor hears what sounds like the house giggling “in a breath of air through the room, a little mad rising laugh, the smallest whisper of a laugh, and Eleanor heard it all up and down her back, a little gloating laugh moving past them around the house…” (pp. 96-7) This language seems a little mad itself, and penetrates more deeply than King’s admittedly scary, but more superficial and pulpy, descriptions of the corpse in the bathtub.

Both The Haunting of Hill House and The Shining trap their flawed, depressed protagonists in claustrophobic situations. Both use character development as much as (or more than) horror conventions to create suspense. Both build toward intense climaxes in which their main characters succumb to the powerful supernatural attractions of their surroundings. The difference is mainly that Jackson’s psychologically piercing descriptions and jaggedly poetic language push deeper into the fears of the reader than King’s more old-fashioned, sometimes pedestrian sentences.