[REVIEW] The Haunting of House Hill

[rfmcdonald]

While completing my convalescence, I read Shirley Jackson's The Haunting, a renamed version of her classic 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House published as a tie-in for the dismal 1999 movie featuring Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta-Jones that was a remake of a much superior 1963 original. Jackson is most famous for her short story "The Lottery," which has managed to find its way onto assigned reading lists for high school students across North America, at least, but I think that there are certain subtle flaws in "The Lottery." I can't think of anything comparable in The Haunting of House Hill, which is the best novelistic example of Freud's concept of the uncanny that I can remember reading.