Rereading "The Haunting of Hill House" after my initial foray in 2018 showed how important rereads can be. Six years is a long time, and I've grown as person and artist (dichotomy intended). I love Shirley Jackson, but I thought this book was hella boring. Nothing's scary and nothing happens! Whats-her-face just drives into a tree! How is this the "scariest horror novel" or whatever?

... but this time, I've realized a mastery of Jackson's prose: your imagination is what makes it scary, just as the characters' imaginations bring forth the House. Jackson doesn't outright describe the pathway through the forest that Eleanor and Theo take, because she knows anything your mind uses to fill in the gaps makes it far creepier. You might read about the room in the center of the house that the characters' sing and dance and hang out in, and as we all know merriment dispels ghosts... but what if you expand outward and consider the whole house? What if you imagine this island of ostensible happiness as a silent, dark, house leans over them in what is its absolute focal point? Jackson's stark prose came off as beige in 2018, but that couldn't be further from the truth; what she did was provide me the outline, knowing what whatever I sketched in would be far more terrifying and bring me closer to Eleanor than anything else. And *that* is the horror of Hill House within the book... and without.