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Books Like Hill House
Psychological Horror Novels Like The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is the foundational text of the modern haunted house story — Eleanor's dissolution, the house that watches, the horror that is always already inside. These 8 novels share its psychological intensity, its unreliable narrator, and its use of a physical space as the embodiment of psychological dread.
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We Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Shirley Jackson
Merricat Blackwood and her sister Constance live in isolation in their family home after the poisoning of most of the household — Jackson's final novel shares Hill House's psychological intensity, its first-person unreliable narrator, and its sense of a house as a refuge that is also a prison; where Eleanor is dissolved by Hill House, Merricat has chosen her enclosure
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Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
Manderley, Mrs. Danvers, the ghost of the first wife — du Maurier's Gothic masterpiece is the closest literary predecessor to Hill House in its technique of using a house as the embodiment of dread, its self-doubting female narrator who cannot trust her own perceptions, and its suggestion that the greatest threat comes not from the supernatural but from the living
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The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
A governess at a remote English estate becomes convinced the children in her care are being corrupted by the ghosts of two dead servants — James's 1898 novella shares Hill House's technique of making the horror inseparable from the narrator's psychology, so that the reader cannot determine whether the supernatural events are real or generated by a disturbed mind
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House of Leaves
by Mark Z. Danielewski
A blind man's academic study of a documentary about a house that is larger on the inside than the outside — Danielewski's 2000 novel is the most ambitious contemporary descendant of Hill House, sharing its sense of a house as an active malevolent presence, its interest in the fragmentation of a narrator under psychological pressure, and its formal innovation (footnotes, appendices, typographical experimentation) as part of the horror
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The Little Stranger
by Sarah Waters
A country doctor becomes increasingly involved with the last family living in a decaying manor house — Waters's 2009 Gothic novel is the closest contemporary parallel to Hill House: an unreliable narrator, a house that seems to resist its inhabitants, and a mounting ambiguity about whether the supernatural events have a psychological or a literal explanation
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Mexican Gothic
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
A glamorous socialite travels to a remote Mexican manor house to investigate her cousin's mysterious illness and discovers that the house itself is the source of the horror — Moreno-Garcia's 2020 novel is the most successful recent Gothic novel in the Hill House tradition: atmospheric, psychologically complex, and using a female protagonist whose sanity is constantly questioned
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, is haunted by the ghost of the daughter she killed to spare her from slavery — Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winner shares Hill House's sense of a place and a past that will not release their inhabitants, and its understanding that the most terrifying ghosts are those made by human beings rather than the supernatural
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The Shining
by Stephen King
A family spends the winter as caretakers of the isolated Overlook Hotel, and the hotel begins to work on the father's madness — King's 1977 novel is the most celebrated popular descendant of Hill House, explicitly in dialogue with Jackson's technique of a building that chooses and feeds on its inhabitants; King has cited Jackson's opening paragraph as one of the most important influences on his own work
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