Shirley Jackson and the Eerie Omniscient Narrator

Some thoughts on the horror classic The Haunting of Hill House

It’s my birthday today, so I’m going to selfishly remind readers that my new novel Metallic Realms was published this spring to rave reviews. I hope you’ll consider buying a copy or, if you’ve read and enjoyed, leaving a review on Goodreads, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble.

(My previous novel The Body Scout and story collection Upright Beasts remain available too.)

This October, like many Octobers, I reread Shirley Jackson’s haunted house masterpiece The Haunting of Hill House. That it isn’t my absolute favorite Shirley Jackson novel¹ is just a testament to how many brilliant works she wrote. If you aren’t familiar with Hill House—or are only familiar with the not-a-real-adaptation Netflix adaptation²—then you should probably close this article and go read it. Hill House is a classic of the horror genre for a reason, and in many ways it set the template for haunted house novels. Jackson’s characters, from the creepy caretakers to the “scientific” investigator, have become archetypes of the genre. Stephen King is a great admirer, and there are more than a few elements of Hill House in The Shining, such as an evil building feeding off the psychic powers of a guest.³ Anyway, go read it. Or, be warned of spoilers ahead.

If you want to watch an adaptation after reading, then I highly recommend the 1963 Robert Wise-directed version, called merely The Haunting. That film uses German expressionist techniques that evoke the Gothic atmosphere of Jackson’s novel. (For Twin Peaks fans, it also stars a young Dr. Jacoby.) But, of course, the book is best.

Every time I reread The Haunting of Hill House, I notice something new. This is true of every great novel, I think. Last time, I was shocked by how funny the novel is. For a spine-tingling classic of the horror genre, Hill House provides a surprising amount of belly laughs. (Mrs. Montague and Arthur are an excellent comedy duo.) Although part of the eeriness of Hill House is how quickly the characters’ emotions and the tone of the text will abruptly swerve.⁴ There is no sure footing in Hill House.

This read, I found myself struck by the narrator. The Haunting of Hill House is largely a close-third POV⁵ novel focused on Eleanor Vance. The close-third occupies perhaps 80% of the text. (Rough guess here.) However, there is an omniscient-third voice that will sometimes dip into the heads of other characters and often simply speaks to the reader. This voice often describes the eerie atmosphere and strange anthropomorphic nature of the vile house. Perhaps it is even the house itself speaking?

I tried googling articles on Jackson’s use of POV in Hill House and mostly found people complaining about how “omniscient POV doesn’t work for horror.”⁶ That annoyed me enough to figure I should write a post about Jackson’s masterful use of POV.

We might as well start with the famous opening paragraph:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

There is much to admire in this opening paragraph, especially Jackson’s willingness—as Benjamin Dreyer points out in this lovely piece—to toss in semi-colons, adverbs, and in general break the fake “rules” so many insist on. The grammatical strangeness of the opening, lovely as it is, feels like Hill House itself: alluring and crooked.

It’s great prose, and also works thematically and sets the atmosphere of the book. It is an example of how style is more than just sentences. Style is intricately tied to everything in a story.

Style Is More than Sentences

There is also an intriguing limitation to the seemingly omniscient narrator. “Whatever walked there,” “might stand,” “supposed, by some.” What is this narrator holding back from us, and why?

The narrator of the opening almost seems like a different person than the narrator that, immediately after, begins introducing us to the characters in almost snarky ways: “Luke Sanderson was a liar. He was also a thief.” “Eleanor Vance was thirty-two years old when she came to Hill House. The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She despised her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends.” (Can you imagine Jackson ever worrying about something like “unlikable characters”?)

Hill House’s narrator spends much of the novel in a more traditional limited third POV. But the omniscient narrator intrudes throughout to evoke the eerie atmosphere and lurking terror of the text. The start of Chapter III, Section 2:

The four of them stood, for the first time, in the wide, dark entrance hall of Hill House. Around them the house steadied and located them, above them the hills slept watchfully, small eddies of air and sound and movement stirred and waited and whispered, and the center of consciousness was somehow the small space where they stood, four separated people, and looked trustingly at one another.

“Around them the house steadied and located them,” is such a strange and chilling clause. A traditional omniscient narrator is often thought of as an author stand-in, or the “implied author.” Yet in passages like this I can’t help but think it is Hill House itself speaking to the reader, hinting at, yet still keeping hidden, its many mysteries. It is a voice slinking in the shadows, watching us. A hand that might grab out and clutch ours in the dark of night.

Another example is near the end of Chapter III, when the narrator floats around to check in on the sleeping characters in Hill House and even some beyond it, such as the caretaker, Mrs. Dudley, and the home’s legal owner, Gloria Sanderson. In the middle of this, the text says, “Around them the house brooded, settling and stirring with a movement that was almost like a shudder.”

There is an unmistakable sense that the house isn’t merely haunted, but is itself alive and evil. (The narrator too seems if not evil then at least unwell.) Yet all of this is filtered through a level of ambiguity and obscurity that evokes a sense of “terror” as opposed to “horror.” I’ve written about this concept before, but in Gothic and horror literature there is a tradition of defining “horror” as the feeling evoked by the visible sight of the monstrous and “terror” as the feeling created by obscurity and ambiguity about the monstrous. Think about your favorite horror movie. When the characters hear noises outside the door or see flashes of something lurking in the dark, that is terror. The hints of the monstrous that allow your mind to fill in the rest. Terror creates an awful and chilling tension. But when the serial killer or monster jumps out of the bushes or breaks down the door and then slaughters a character as you watch, that is horror. It can be scary, but the scare is often of the brief “jump scare” variety. Terror lingers.

The distinction originates with famed Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe, who explains it this way:

Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them […] and where lies the great difference between horror and terror but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?

Writing Terror into Your Horror

Most horror contains both “terror” and “horror” in this sense, but terror is thought to be the more sublime⁷ emotion to evoke. And also one that can be trickier to maintain. One of the marvels of The Haunting of Hill House is that Jackson keeps us entirely in the zone of terror with no real moments of horror at all. The characters hear terrible noises outside the door or see strange writings on the wall. But they do not see anything with clarity, except Theodora who sees something and screams “Don’t look back, don’t look back—don’t look—run!”

The omniscient narrator declines to tell us anything more about what Theodora saw. The reader is left to wonder.

The narrator’s overt intrusions into the text are eerie, but I also can’t help thinking that the narrator slips into even the ostensibly third-person limited passages. “Now I am really afraid, Eleanor thought in words of fire […] it was bitterly cold, no human warmth near.” While this is tagged as Eleanor’s thought, “words of fire” and “no human warmth near” seem like the voice of the opening paragraph and not Eleanor.

Eleanor’s narration is slippery in other ways. She is a childlike adult whose mind is prone to daydreaming. Her passages will often veer into long fantasies, even before she gets to Hill House. When she passes a house with lion statues on the steps, she starts to recount her life in the past tense: “Every morning I swept the porch and dusted the lions, and every evening I patted their heads good night, and once a week I washed their faces and manes and paws with warm water and soda and cleaned between their teeth with a swab.” That Eleanor’s fantasies bleed into reality evokes the opening line—“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality”—and also perhaps mirrors how the house will bleed into Eleanor. And how the narrator does too.

Again, I wonder if the narrator is at times the house itself. One repeated phrase in the book is “Journeys end in lovers meeting.” Sometimes this is Eleanor’s fanciful thoughts. Other times, such as the penultimate page, it seems like the house’s warning. The same rotten, vile, evil house that begins to merge with Eleanor—or is it eating her?—and seems to control her actions and mind as the novel veers toward its awful conclusion, retreating only briefly for Eleanor to realize what is happening: “Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don’t they stop me?”

The novel closes by repeating the mysterious opening. The narrator will not tell us what it is that lurks in Hill House, only that “whatever walked there, walked alone.”

Hill House as depicted in The Haunting (1963)

1. That would be We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

2. The Netflix show is more of an unrelated story that takes a few character names from Jackson—turning them into siblings instead of the strangers they are in the novel—and some vague Gothic trappings.

3. This is ambiguous in Jackson’s novel, but implied.

4. A lesson that more than a few monotonally dour horror novelists could learn…

5. “Limited third” and “close third” are creative writing jargon for when a narrator only gives us the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of a particular character while in third-person POV. Omniscient third is a sort of narrator-god voice that can tell us anyone’s feelings and perceptions, as well as the future, the past, or anything else.

6. Where do people even come up with these bizarre and restrictive claims? If you followed the internet advice—No prologues! No omniscient POV! No unlikable characters! No adverbs! etc. etc. etc.—there’d be nothing of fiction left.

7. Literally, in Ann Radcliffe’s definition.

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My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.