Books: Mom Did It

THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE (246 pp.)—Shirley Jackson—Viking ($3.95).

When busy Housewife Shirley Jackson finds time for a new novel, she instinctively begins to id-lib. Her favorite fictional creation is the normal-looking girl who lives in a private nightmare of someone else’s making. This heroine is usually close enough to sanity to be alarmed by her own fantasies, near enough to a strait-jacket to invite immediate psychoanalysis. The familiar formula, which worked almost magically well in Hangsaman (TIME, April 23, 1951). but began to look a bit seedy in The Bird’s Nest (TIME, June 21, 1954), still carries a lot of the Jackson punch.

Climate of Horror. Unmarried at 32, Eleanor Vance has spent the past eleven years of her life caring for a sick mother whom she hated. Now Mama has died, Eleanor is living with a dull married sister, and her experience of life is a dreary vacuum. It is almost like liberation when Dr. Montague takes her on as one of three assistants to check psychic phenomena at a haunted house in a grubby small town. Author Jackson, a self-confessed dabbler in magic, sets her scene with professional care. The big old house is a crazily built warren of odd rooms and twisting corridors. For 80 years it has witnessed a variety of human disasters, and now it is deserted by its owners; the caretaking couple refuse to stay beyond 6 in the evening, and the townspeople go surly when it is even mentioned.

The climate of horror develops soon enough. There are unearthly night noises, a ghostly hand scrawls HELP ELEANOR COME HOME, and some force or creature smears blood (or is it red paint?) over the clothes of another of the doctor’s girl assistants. Eleanor begins to crack soon enough; her whole personality begins to disintegrate, and fantasy takes over from reality. She awakens at night to the call of her dead mother. All too soon it becomes obvious that Mama is the real couch-history villain and that Eleanor never really had a chance.

Refuge from Life. Within a week Eleanor is thinking of the haunted house as a refuge from her hated life. She gradually gives up her fears, her fight for sanity, puts out welcoming arms to the madness that embraces her. She dances through the house like a dervish at night, comes close to what seems happy suicide. By this time Dr. Montague and the others insist on sending her home, and Eleanor’s life ends in one of those terrible scenes of mental horror that Author Jackson knows so well how to contrive. The difficulty is that the story is itself caught in a straitjacket fashioned by the lines of case history. Expert as it is, The Haunting of Hill House is also haunted by too many other novels that owe their life to the father of psychoanalysis.