The experience of reading this book was similar to my experience seeing the film The Exorcist for the first (and so far, only) time. I'd steered clear of the Exorcist for a long time because I'm a wimp and I was told how terrifying it was over and over again. The hype of it as 'one of the scariest movies of all time' had me firmly prepared to never watch it. When I finally did see it in my mid-twenties, I was seriously underwhelmed. I thought the movie was cheesy and, to be honest, boring.

As far as The Haunting of Hill House goes, I wasn't actively avoiding it, but it wasn't a story I knew much about before the Netflix series that came out last year. I'd heard of it, and heard it referred to as a classic horror novel and 'one of the greatest of all time' but never really had an interest in it.
I finally decided to read it this fall, and I have to say, I don't get the hype.

First of all, and probably the most important point for me...this book isn't scary. It's not spooky. It's not even creepy. Most of the time is spent with a small group of insipid characters just talking about nothing. I didn't feel like I knew any of the characters at all, and I never understood why these particular people were chosen and why they would decide to go to this supposedly haunted house and stay there. Luke is the outlier in that he is actually part of the family who owns the house, but there really isn't much of a purpose or motivation given to any of these characters that really makes sense to me.

In reality, this seems to be a book about mental illness more than a book about a haunted house. Maybe that was supposed to be the point and I'm just not smart enough to get it.
Eleanor is the POV we follow for the most part, and we see her mental state degrade over the course of the book. We're supposed to infer, I believe, that something about the house is affecting her and causing her sense of reality to become warped and ultimately, she suffers a mental break. But it was obvious from the very beginning of the novel that she spends a lot of time inside her own head concocting fantasies and is already susceptible to this kind of behavior.

I don't feel like I have much to say about the other characters, specifically Luke, who I know nothing about. I'm not sure what his purpose was in the book.

The writing isn't as strong as I was hoping it would be, considering how renowned Shirley Jackson seems to be. It was very poetical in spots, specifically the dialogue and Eleanor's musings about the world around her. I saw another review that talked about this being in a sort of beatnik style. I can't speak to that, not knowing a lot about that artistic movement, but I will say that there were times when the dialogue and interactions between the characters felt more like a dream than something that we're supposed to believe was really happening.

I won't say that this is a case of the show being better than the book, although I do think that the Netflix show is better than this book.(Seriously. If you haven't watched the show, stop reading this right now and GO WATCH. It's so good.) But I also don't consider them to really be related. Besides some of the characters names and the name of the house, there is little to no resemblance between these two pieces of fiction. I'm not even sure how the show came about as an adaptation. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the show was developed completely separately from the book and then someone said, "Hey, why don't we change some of these names and market it as an adaptation of the Haunting of Hill House?" It wouldn't be the first time that's happened.

I do feel a little bad giving this two stars. It's really more of a 2.5. There's nothing WRONG with the book, but I just didn't enjoy myself.