We've got your back. With the Tough-O-Meter, you'll know whether to bring extra layers or Swiss army knives as you summit the literary mountain. (10 = Toughest)
(3) Base Camp
The Haunting of Hill House is a horror of a novel, but unlike some literary masterpieces, the horrors here are not to be found in difficult, cursed prose.
Jackson's writing style can be a little fancy. She writes some pretty elaborate sentences, with intricate twists and turns. Some of them go on for a long time. Look at this one:
The pounding had stopped, as though it had proved ineffectual, and there was now a swift movement up and down the hall, as of an animal pacing back and forth with unbelievable impatience, watching first one door and then another, alert for movement inside […] (7.188)
We even cut that one short.
But you'll notice the words in our example aren't that complex, despite being so descriptive. Plus, Jackson is a master at her craft, so a reader has to go out of his or her way to notice the sentences becoming long in the ink. If you just let the flow take you, you'll find an easygoing, conversational novel.
The themes are about as difficult as the writing style. There are a lot of them, and what the novel is trying to say with them can be pretty ambiguous. But "ambiguous" and "difficult" are not the same thing here. It's ambiguous whether or not Theodora and Eleanor are sexually attracted to one another, for example, but it's not too difficult to see that ambiguity at play. Like, we know there's something between them (that's easy to figure out), but just what that something isn't so clear (that's harder to figure out).
Hill House can be a terrifying place, but the scares come from the chilling atmosphere, the unstable characters, and the macabre mysteries—not from the challenge of reading it.