Shirley Jackson's Most Disturbing Book Isn't 'The Haunting of Hill House'

Published Oct 16, 2026, 12:06 AM EDT

Kelcie Mattson is a Senior Features author at Collider. Based in the Midwest, she also contributes Lists, reviews, and television recaps. A lifelong fan of niche sci-fi, high fantasy, Gothic horror, elaborate action, and witty detective fiction, becoming a pop culture devotee was inevitable once the Disney Renaissance, Turner Classic Movies, BBC period dramas, and her local library piqued her imagination.

Rarely seen without a book in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, Kelcie explores media history (especially older, foreign, and independent films) as much as possible. You’ll also find her enjoying video games, amateur photography, geeking out over all music genres, admiring birds from her porch, trying to overcome her meager baking skills, and attending fan conventions with her Trekkie family.

The Haunting of Hill House would be an unsurpassable achievement for most authors. In terms of Gothic horror touchstones, the brilliance of Shirley Jackson’s novel remains nearly unmatched — a classic ghost story featuring a distressed heroine and a foreboding house marked by human violence and paranormal malevolence, rich with stifling tension and subtle psychological ambiguity. Jackson’s astute insights into humanity, her bewitching prose, and her calibrated knack for atmosphere cement her as a genre pioneer with generational skill and matching influence.

If Hill House qualifies as her career-defining title, then even more accolades surround her follow-up novel. The titular building in We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a different breed of haunted residence, but still populated by suffocating claustrophobia. Jackson’s last work shows an extraordinary storyteller at the height of her craft, commanding structure, tone, misdirection, and her singular fictional creation. Volatile, disarmingly tender, and impossible to shake, Castle is a chilling tragedy wrapped in lush language and hidden barbed wire.

An old house, built by an old-money family, sits on the outskirts of a small American town. The estate belongs to the Blackwoods: Mary Katharine, nicknamed Merricat, her severely agoraphobic sister Constance, and their uncle Julian. The trio are the only survivors of the same unsolved arsenic poisoning that claimed the lives of the siblings’ father, mother, brother, and aunt six years earlier. Constance, then 22 years old, was the main suspect before insufficient evidence secured her acquittal. Almost as reclusive as her beloved Constance but more suspicious, 18-year-old Merricat vigilantly monitors for any threat — perceived or genuine — to her family’s serene isolation. Her handmade magical wards fail to keep their cousin Charles from trespassing right up to their doorstep. As he ingratiates himself into Constance’s good graces, Merricat sees a wealth-seeking predator determined to steal her sole companion.

Supernatural metaphors don’t grace Castle’s edges. This Gothic fairy tale-turned-nightmare surrounds the everyday evil individuals commit, the inescapable torments of the mind, and the insidious damage both inflict upon women. Social oppression, familial abuse, domestic spheres being safe havens or eternal traps, and rebellious protagonists with complex trauma, anxiety, guilt, and anger are common themes throughout Jackson’s oeuvre, and the same holds true for Castle.

In this case, the xenophobic fear of anyone different critiques both ways. The townsfolk have reviled the Blackwoods for years; a ghastly scandal gives them permission to fully unleash their mob-mentality persecution upon a teenage girl. Compared to the exterior world “full of terrible people,” at least the sisters’ death-filled home and their internalized horrors are predictably familiar. Meanwhile, the younger Blackwood orphan has inherited her aristocratic family’s dehumanizing, class-based prejudice — but with excessively bloodthirsty intensity. Merricat silently fantasizes about retaliating through torturous punishment.

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