This book has, I think, the greatest opening paragraph of all time. Honestly, that paragraph is my favourite thing about it, and the rest of the book almost lives up to it. Jackson's prose is so restrained, punctuated with little bursts of loveliness, and it only exacerbates the horror. Because this is fundamentally a horror story, one about a haunted house, and it's genuinely frightening to see how Hill House undermines the sanity of its visitors. This is particularly the case with Eleanor, who if not really unstable to begin with has been beaten down by life, made vulnerable in any number of ways, and there's always that question, running underneath the text: is Hill House really to blame for what happens to her, or did she bring the haunting with her?