Haunted House, M.D.
How many ways can a Structure be scary? Let's count.
I have a really fun crimp in my worldview where I really don’t believe in ghosts but I did once live in a 200-year-old house where the men who had renovated it were explicitly instructed not to tell us about the disembodied footsteps they kept hearing upstairs until we signed the lease, and after I moved out I did ask if anyone else ever heard the baby crying or the mandolin music coming from nowhere. I try not to think about this too hard!
The Woman in Black is such a perfect illustration of the power of setting. Also place names. The house in this book is set on Eel Marsh, and is only accessible during low tides (across a strip of land called the Nine Lives Causeway). A junior lawyer is tasked with going through documents in this house, a place everyone in the whole town seems pretty interested in completely avoiding. There’s a room in the house that’s locked, sorry not just locked, completely missing a doorknob at all, from which the lawyer will sometimes hear a slow and repeated thudding sound. One morning the door is just… open. This book is everything you could possibly want from a haunted house. AND, crucially, the little dog, named Spider, IS NOT HARMED, I promise.
Obviously Haunting of Hill House has to be on here. It’s not just in the DNA of this whole genre, it’s genuinely still an incredible read that continues to feel oddly modern. Jackson’s ability to conjure up a house that’s impossible to navigate is so good. It is always taking characters way too long to make it back to rooms they theoretically were just coming from. The house has behaviors that are both constant in ways that become almost mundane, if fraying, to the characters, like knocking that comes just a bit too high up on the other side of doors to be human, and also frequently completely unpredictable and freshly horrifying. Some of the stuff the characters see they refuse to describe to us, which is even WORSE.
Haunting on the Hill is impressing in its ability to hold a candle to its predecessor, creating its own domicile with its own unique and terrible attributes that terrorize the, I’ll say assholes, who populate it, like woodwork the characters keep seeing themselves in, a hallway that Sucks To Be In, wildlife that acts distinctly un-wild, and a tiny door that leads to …???
MAN, this book is gothic. Like, I know you’d assume it’s pretty gothic from the name but even for that, this guy GOTHS HARD. This is another work that has woven such an incredible amount of texture and character into its house, in this case The High Place, a crumbling ancestral manor in the Mexican countryside built metaphorically and also possibly physically on the workers who built it. There’s hostile residents! There’s a weird smell! There’s a suspiciously ornate and foggy on-prem graveyard! You will never in a thousand years be able to guess what’s going on here. Mexican Gothic has it all.