SYNOPSIS:

Four people venture to spend a summer in the reportedly haunted Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for proof of ghosts, Theodora, his assistant, Eleanor, a young recluse, and Luke, the heir to the house. The group begins to experience strange and unexplained events. That plot might be familiar to you if you've seen either the intense 1963 psychological thriller movie The Haunting or the goofy, bad 1993 version of The Haunting. Jackson was such a master of creating suspenseful tension that there is even an award named for her that recognizes contemporary literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic. What makes the novel so effective is its unreliable narrator, Eleanor. Being limited by her incomplete perspective makes the reader just as unsure and vulnerable as she is. This perspective become more suffocating and tense as the line between the real and unreal and the living and dead becomes more and more blurred.