Review: The Haunting of Hill House at Strange Horizons

My review of Netflix's miniseries adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is up at Strange Horizons today.  I ended up feeling deeply conflicted about the show.  Like many Jackson fans, I was initially dismayed by its decision to rip out the original novel's story and replace it with something in which only a few character names and details are recognizable.  Then I was won over by the excellence of this substitute story, and the way it combined supernatural haunting with thoroughly mundane family drama and the effects that unacknowledged tragedy can have on families.  And then, as the series's storytelling started groaning as it approached its conclusion, I started to notice how its deviation from the novel reaches much further than changing the plot, to a complete misunderstanding of what Jackson was trying to do with her story, particularly when it comes to gender.  The Netflix version of Haunting prioritizes male characters and treats women as tragic victims, which is something that Jackson would surely have strenuously objected to. 

Still, I've found that Haunting has lingered with me in the weeks since I watched it (certainly far more than Netflix's other major October offerings, like the third season of Daredevil and the reboot of Sabrina, both of which ended up feeling centerless, and uncertain about their main characters).  I'm not sure if I can exactly recommend it, but if you do choose to watch it, you'll find plenty to chew over.

This is also a good opportunity to mention that the Strange Horizons fund drive is running, and with only a week left, is still quite short of its goal.  The magazine has continued to do great work in the last year, and in the reviews department in particular, there has been some fantastic writing in 2018: Nandini Ramachandran on The Shape of Water, Maggie Clark on The Wrong Stars by Tim Pratt, Vajra Chandrasekera's excellent overview of this year's Clarke Award shortlist (part 1 and 2), Erin Horakova on Netflix's reboot of The Worst Witch, Matt Hilliard on the middle two books of Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series (part 1 and 2), and many others.  If you want this work to continue, please consider making a contribution.

2014, A Year in Reading: Best Books of the Year

I read 47 books in 2014, which, strangely enough, is exactly the same number as I read last year--not sure that's ever happened, and certainly not since I started keeping track.  It was a very odd year too, reading-wise, with periods of intense and enjoyable reading alternating with long fallow stretches in which nothing appealed and the thought of concentrating on a single work was positively wearying.  Nevertheless, looking back at the books I did manage to read this year, I'm impressed with their quality and how much I enjoyed them.  Usually these end-of-year posts include examples of the year's worst reads as well as the best ones, but this year I don't really have any nominees for the former category.  The closest I came to a bad book this year was Dorothy L. Sayers's Five Red Herrings, in which Sayers takes her obsession with "fair play" mysteries to unreasonable extremes, bogging the reader down in minute descriptions of the various suspects' movements, travel time calculations, and of course train schedules, that completely overwhelm any interest we might have had in the characters, the detectives, and even the central murder.

Nevertheless, Five Red Herrings was a blip in what has otherwise been a strong year for mysteries, which make up a full third of the year's reading.  This is down largely to two series--the Holmes canon, which I revisited for the first time since my teens (you can see my thoughts on the various novels and story collections at my Storify account), and Sayers's Peter Wimsey novels.  I've read (and in some cases reread) the novels featuring Wimsey's love interest and fellow detective Harriet Vane, but this was my first time through the solo novels, which I am reading in order.  With the obvious exception of Five Red Herrings, it's turning out to be a delightful experience, with Wimsey shining on his own as both a character and a detective (though the classist and occasionally sexist aspects of the novels can be hard to take).

Otherwise, it was a quiet year for genre reading.  Aside from the mysteries, most of the books I read were either literary or historical fiction.  I tend to seesaw between the two extremes as my year-end reviews point out to me how I've neglected a particular corner of my reading, so expect a stronger genre year in 2015 (and anyway, there are quite a few genre novels I'm planning to read in the coming weeks as I gear up for Hugo nominations).  Something else that I'd like to focus on in 2015 is reviewing the books I read, which I've neglected terribly this year--though I planned to do so several times, I don't think I've written a single full-length book review this year.  Next year, I'd like to not only get back to that, but maybe change up the format of reviews on this blog a little.  Instead of concentrating my shorter book reviews into recent reading roundups, I'm thinking of posting them as I go in individual blog posts (I might do the same thing for film reviews as well).  I don't know if that's a format that will suit me--I think I've nailed my colors rather firmly to the long review--but it's worth experimenting with.  At any rate, my reading resolution for 2015 is the same as every year's, and the same, I think, as every book blogger's--to read more, and more widely, and to blog more about what I read.

For the last few hours of 2014, however, here are my best reads of the year, in alphabetical order of the author's surname:

• Spin by Nina Allan
  
  I'm very much looking forward to Allan's debut novel The Race, which is sitting in my TBR stack, and a great deal of that expectation is rooted in the exceptional quality of this 2013 novella (which deserved a lot more awards attention than it got).  Allan's prose is spare and her story is low-key, but with those deceptively simple tools she constructs an elaborate alternate world, in which religion and government are subtly but powerfully different, and magic is real but heavily regulated.  The story of a young artist struggling with a difficult family history and her nascent magical powers is woven into the myth of Arachne in ways that are delightful and thought-provoking, but an equal pleasure is Allan's handling of the seemingly mundane topic of an artist discovering her voice and style.  The fact that the heroine is engaged in the traditionally feminine (and thus frequently delegitimized) field of textile arts only makes the seriousness with which Allan depicts her process more enjoyable.
  
  
• Longbourn by Jo Baker
  
  I had no idea what it expect from this book, and yet it's lingered with me through the year.  The concept seems gimmicky and calculating--Pride and Prejudice retold from the perspective of the Bennetts' servants--but not only does Longbourn tells its own story, into which the original novel intrudes only occasionally, but it uses its central concept for a lot more than just a refreshing perspective shift.  Through her heroines--the thoughtful, searching maid-of-all-work Sarah, and the level-headed but loving housekeeper Mrs. Hill--Baker explores not only the life of a Regency servant, but the effect that class has on women's roles in that era, and on the limitations and expectations placed on them.  The final encounter between Sarah and Elizabeth Bennett is devastating for what it reveals about the two women's choice between freedom and security, and for the value that is placed (and often not placed) on their work.  Far from repeating Pride and Prejudice, Longbourn uses its outline to make its own statement, and is all the more powerful for it.
  
  
• Versailles by Kathryn Davis
  
  I read several books this year by Davis, an author of quasi-slipstreamy literary fiction whose dense, impressionistic prose shifts time, place, and point of view at a moment's notice.  Versailles--a short novel about Marie Antoinette--is the one that has stuck with me.  As much about the palace and its history as it is about its heroine, the novel switches from her point of view to potted histories of the palace, to interludes with her servants and courtiers.  Amazingly given its slight size, both the character and the place emerge as fully-formed creations, and Antoinette in particular is sympathetic and interesting (though perhaps a little too prone to self-justification).  It often feels as if historical fiction is too beholden to realism, too conventionally structured and plotted.  Versailles is a rare and welcome instance of an author experimenting within that form, and it yields great results.
  
  
• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
  
  A bit of a cheat, since this isn't a book that I read for the first time in 2014, but as my return to Hill House revealed, the first time I read this book it went completely over my head.  In my mid-or-late teens, I expected a haunted house story to have, well, ghosts, and preferably an explanation for them.  I wasn't able to understand that what makes The Haunting of Hill House so scary is the house's unknowability, and even more than that, the hauntings that the ghost-hunter protagonists--and particularly the troubled, childish heroine Eleanor--bring with them when they come to stay.  The second time around, I feel as if I've discovered this novel for the first time, and am kicking myself for not revisiting it sooner.  It seems as if, in recent years, Hill House's star has dimmed a little in favor of Jackson's other and equally magnificent novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle--perhaps because its conventions have been recycled by works like House of Leaves, whereas Castle remains utterly unique.  I think it may be time for a rediscovery--I'm sure I'm not the only one who needed to be reminded of what a sharp, tense, frightening novel this is.
  

Honorable Mentions:

• HHhH by Laurent Binet - At once a nonfiction account of the attempted assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, a fictionalization of it, and a meditation about the gap between the two, this novel (?) is surprisingly readable and entertaining for such an odd experiment (and such a grim topic).
  
  
• The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox - A lush, beautifully written historical fantasy about the lifelong love between a 19th century French winemaker and an angel.  Weird and indescribable, but utterly enchanting.
  
  
• Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner - This slim volume constructs a whole fantasy world, complete with manners and conventions, within a few chapters, and the political and social drama that it sets within that world (not to mention its central love story) is instantly engaging.
  
  
• Tenth of December  by George Saunders - Sharp, funny, and often extremely weird short stories.  Genre readers will like Saunders's forays into that field, but his mimetic stories are equally distinct and memorable.

Recent Reading Roundup 4

Look! Little rectangular things with printed paper inside! How novel!

I've been in something of a reading slump lately, which is expressed not simply by the fact that I'm reading less (and I am--11 books since the beginning of the year, as opposed to nearly 20 in the same period last year) but that I have less to say about the books that I do read. Hence the recent proliferation of film- and TV-related posts. In the interest of pretending that this is still something like a lit-blog, therefore, here's another roundup, and hopefully I'll have something more substantial to write about in the near future

1. Viriconium by M. John Harrison
   
   Before I start talking about the book itself (or, more accurately, about the omnibus itself, which collects three short novels and a short story collection, published between 1971 and 1985) I just want to take a minute to be awed by the book as an object--gorgeous, embossed cover; french flaps; rough-cut pages--I wish I'd been a little happier with the interior. I seem to be moving backwards in time through Harrison's bibliography, and although there are indications in the Viriconium cycle of the themes that would occupy Harrison throughout his career--a genteel, unassuming, what's-it-all-about-really sort of nihilism, a disappointment with both quotidian reality and any attempt at breaking away from it--they are neither as well-developed nor as concise as they would come to be. Similarly, Harrison's prose has yet to develop the precision that allows him, in his more mature incarnation, to convey emotion, action, and atmosphere is a single brief and beautiful sentence. Viriconium the city, the hub of a post-apocalyptice empire ruled by half-mad monarchs and starkly divided between its Upper and Lower halves (where the nobility and the criminals, respectively, live and love), doesn't quite have the taste of reality to it--it feels like a metaphor, or a clever literary construct, rather than a real place. I probably liked the first Viriconium novel, The Pastel City, best, as it is a rather traditional story--an old knight is recruited by a young queen in peril--told with a typical Harrison-ian contravention of stereotypes. At the same time, however, I know that Harrison has gone on to do a better job of twisting and contorting fantasy clichés--to the point where he leaves the familiar tropes of fantasy behind while still skewering the genre's basic assumptions (not to mention that, in recent years in particular, there have been better examples than The Pastel City of the epic fantasy story retold in a sophisticated, thoughtful manner). I didn't care for the second novel, A Storm of Wings, and the third, In Viriconium, had an interesting premise but didn't quite gel (although I have to admit that I begin to appreciate the piece a bit more now that I've gained some distance from it). The short stories, with the possible exception of "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium", didn't impress me, and even that story is overshadowed by Harrison's later novel, The Course of the Heart, which takes a grander and more sophisticated approach to the same theme. This is not to say that I'm discouraged in my journey through Harrison's back-catalog, but I think I'll avoid his earlier pieces and start moving forwards in time--maybe Climbers or the short story collections.


2. The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
   
   The only Jackson I'd read before this collection was The Haunting of Hill House, which left me cold--neither scary nor interesting. Given that novel's premise, however, I was expecting the stories in The Lottery to be concerned with horror and the supernatural, and it was with great surprise that I discovered what is essentially the feminine equivalent of John Cheever. Admittedly, instances of the supernatural or the horrifying crop up in some of the pieces, but they are often so subtle as to barely register, and what's left is suburban ennui and hard-working career girls wondering where their glory days went. There are some real gems here: "After You, My Dear Alphonse", in which a well-meaning housewife is skewered for her thoughtless racism; "Flower Garden", in which the inhabitants of a small town first embrace and then conspire to destroy an outsider who questions their codified social structure; "The Tooth", in which a woman loses herself, and perhaps gains something better, on her way to the dentist. Other stories are not much more than vignettes, explorations of the way in which a conformist, appearance-conscious society can grind an individual--women especially--down, although Jackson's crisp prose and cutting social observations often save even a plotless piece from irrelevance. Sadly, the infamous "Lottery" was a bit of a dud, largely because much like, I suspect, everyone else on the planet, I already knew what the twist was. Overall, a worthy collection, but like The Stories of John Cheever, which I read a few months ago, it suffers rather than benefits from its comprehensiveness.


3. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
   
   Finally, a novel that marries Jackson's sharp prose with a suitably eerie premise. Two sisters, Constance and Mary-Katherine, live with their invalid uncle in the house where, six years ago, their entire family died after sprinkling their blueberries with arsenic-laced sugar. The local villagers, taking a great deal of pleasure in dragging down a once-prominent family, believe the sisters to be murderers and torment them mercilessly, but the makeshift family finds pleasure in its solitude--until, that is, a long-lost cousin appears and upsets their careful routine. The identity of the murderer is sadly obvious about twenty pages into the book, but Castle also acts as a searching examination of how the individual defines normality and the many forms that that definition can take. Constance sublimates herself to the service of her sister and uncle. Mary-Katherine attempts to regulate her life through a series of invented rituals and sacrifices. Uncle Julian obsesses over every detail of his family's tragic death. Cousin Charles, the alleged representative of normal society, is scandalized by the sisters' ungoverned existence, and especially by their inattention to financial matters and to their own wealth. He attempts to dominate Constance and Mary-Katherine with his version of correct behavior, but finds it, and himself, overwhelmed by their unwillingness to conform. The local villagers, meanwhile, use the sisters as both talismans and scapegoats, underlying their rational existence with their own invented rituals and sacrifices. The issues of conformity to social expectations and the darkness that underlies polite society were clearly important to Jackson, and Castle is a brilliant exploration of both.


4. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
   
   I read very, very little non-fiction--I wouldn't be surprised if I didn't read another non-fiction book this year--and what little of it I do read tends to be essay collections, not reimaginings of gruesome true crimes. Perhaps because of this, and perhaps because of the recent scandals about truth in non-fiction, I had a great deal of trouble dealing with Capote's fictionalization of the events he describes. There's constantly an awareness in the book of Capote standing between me and the people he's writing about (and the fact that I had already heard quite a bit about the book's writing, and about Capote's alleged fascination with Perry Smith, was certainly a factor in my reactions here), but even more importantly, there's the knowledge of how well-intentioned, generally truthful people would be inclined to twist the truth in this case. Should I believe that Herb Clutter and his family were really the paragons that Capote describes? And does it even matter what kind of people they were, given that even horrible people wouldn't have deserved the Clutters' cruel fate? How accurate is Capote's psychological portrait of Perry Smith, and why does he seem so uninterested, dismissive even, of Dick Hickock? I found myself unable to read In Cold Blood as either a true historical account or a novelization of a true event, which made for an unsettling reading experience. On those occasions, however, in which I managed to shut down my questioning internal voice, I was able to appreciate that In Cold Blood is beautifully and compellingly written, and that although it can't answer the question that must plague every single person involved with the case--why were these senseless, almost motiveless murders committed?--it addresses it with intelligence and insight.


5. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
   
   My first Hardy (supposedly the one to start with--the least complicated and trying), which has left me uncertain about continuing with him. It is, of course, a beautifully written book with an interesting, topsy-turvy plot (I think this is the very first time that I've been surprised by a plot twist in a Victorian novel), but some aspects of it disturb me. Hardy does an excellent job with the main character, Michael Henchard, who is a tragic hero in the classical sense--he is clearly the author of his own misfortunes, and his attempts to make amends and turn away from immorality are constantly undermined by the deep-seated flaws in his character. The same, unfortunately, can't be said of the secondary characters--Michael's former mistress, a caricature of the fallen woman who dies for her sins, and the ever-so-perfect Elizabeth-Jane and Donald Farfrae. Casterbridge was also intended as a portrait of an English farming town, and as such I couldn't help but compare it to George Eliot's superior attempt at the same concept, Middlemarch. Eliot's novel moves effortlessly between the personal and the communal, and stresses the effect that the one has on the other. Hardy's communal portrait, in contrast, often veers towards the vulgar and the cartoonish, especially in his depiction of Casterbridge's lower-class citizens (although there is an interesting yet understated sub-plot in which these simple people take great pleasure in following the rising fortunes of the town's gentry, and later, an even greater pleasure in tearing them down when they are no longer scrappy underdogs). Hardy's narrative transitions clumsily between delicate character work, tedious historical lectures, and bits of local color which are obviously intended to amuse but, to a modern reader, are painfully condescending. Despite these reservations, there's clearly a great deal to think about and consider in The Mayor of Casterbridge. I'm still trying to puzzle out the various fake relationships in the novel--fake wives, fake husbands, fake fathers and daughters--and the way they parallel each other, and there's no question that Henchard himself is a fascinating, contradictory person. I suspect I will end up reading more of Hardy, although possibly not in the immediate future.