The Haunting of Hill House (Horror 174 pages) by Shirley Jackson is the first book I’ve read out of the required Readings In the Genre: The Haunted for one of my classes this semester. As I tend to do book reviews for everything I read, this kind of assignment tends to work out rather well for me.

To be fair, I haven’t really read that much horror. I have a very vivid imagination and a lot of the mass market stuff hasn’t appealed to me. So I visited two bookstores and one of the local libraries today to see if I could find the books on the list. I purchased three and found one more in the library about a mile from where I live. I spent a few hours of my afternoon reading The Haunting of Hill House on the porch while a light drizzle sprinkled the world around…