Afraid of a Rabbit


Frozen, shoulders pressed together, they stared, watching the spot of hillside across the brook where the grass moved, watching something unseen move slowly across the bright green hill, chilling the sunlight and the dancing little brook. "What is it?" Eleanor said in a breath, and Theodora put a strong hand on her wrist.

"It's gone," Theodora said clearly, and the sun came back and it was warm again. "It was a rabbit," Theodora said.

~ The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson, p. 54

This is, perhaps, the first apparition in The Haunting of Hill House; a rabbit, according to the rash and bohemian Theodora, although we don't see the creature, just its wake as it moves the grass. The two women shake it off, but the moment lingers, their first taste of the weird thrill-fear that this lopsided house will continue to bring down upon them. I read page 54, and most of the other pages of the novel, in breathless thrill yesterday, while my own rabbit Finch sat across the room from me. We call him the Black Prince because of his velvet-dark fur and his haughty attitude and his proud chest, and the way he darts around the room. That's not him in the picture. He doesn't much care for photo posing, plus his darkness means he tends to melt into the background shadows somewhat. Marble, our glamorous lady, was all too happy to step in instead.

Rabbits are like little ghosts. They make noises in the night; bumps, scuttles, scratches on wood. They are crepuscular, meaning they're most active at dawn and dusk, at those twilight hours between darkness and light when the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest. They are ethereal; there one second, soon gone the next. And they are always watching, always lurking, always ready to take instant flight from anyone or anything that gets too close. In a sense, they are that most curious encapsulation of both fear and boldness: out and about but perpetually on guard. The rabbit, then, reflects Eleanor and Theodora in the book, the latter of whom is bold, the former more gripped by fear (although these distinctions become increasingly blurred). Here, in chapter two, they go from strangers to friends in quick-sharp rush of cousinly bonding, but it is a friendship that soon seems to edge into something a little more passionate, in terms of both love and hate. They are complicated women. Eleanor is the apotheosis of Jackson's common theme of the anxious, disturbed, psychosexual heroine who can never quite find her place in the world.

I am a big reader of books, ploughing my way through piles of them, and I never quite feel right if I don't have one on the go. But I find it is a rare occurrence for me to find ones that I absolutely adore and devour and immediately tell everyone about. The Haunting of Hill House is one of those books. I need a while to digest it, but it already feels like an entry into my all-time top ten. It is that good. I was already a fan of Shirley Jackson as she is a master of the weird fiction short story ('The Lottery' is the obvious one, but see also 'The Summer People' and 'The Missing Girl'), but I've been a bit slow on the uptake with her novels. I very much enjoyed We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but there was something next-level, as they say, about Hill House. The house itself, I think, which is absurdly built to be just not right (odd angles, doors not quite set in their frames, a confusing layout), but I also loved the odd oscillations from scenes of sheer terror to bouts of disquieting joy. Then there were the sweeps into something far more abstract and unfathomable in the latter half, before the full fall into Eleanor's incoherence and phantasma at the conclusion. It is everything I try to achieve with my own writing: set-ups towards expectations and then strange pivots to the elsewhere and back again. There is far, far more to it than a simple haunted house story. It is the ultimate haunted house story. It is terrifying and it is masterful.

I haven't watched the recent Netflix adaptation as I don't do particularly well with jump-scare horror. I've read that it is a very loose adaptation which goes in a markedly different direction to the book, with much more emphasis on supernatural apparitions (famously lurking in backgrounds) rather than psycho-melodrama. That's fine by me; I've always been a big believer in fast-and-loose adaptation as too many films and TV shows suffer from trying to be absolutely faithful to the source material. A case in point is the recent Rebecca adaptation, also on Netflix, which I found frustratingly rushed and bloated as it tried to pack every plot point in, resulting in very little time to root out the terrors of the original Du Maurier novel. In the end, it was the worst thing a film adaptation can be: it was fine. By which I mean it was dull. So, the Hill House adaptation can keep its screamy-ghost-faced children, or whatever it is, and I'll leave Jackson's words to lodge in my brain pan, like wraiths in a freaky library tower.

Evening is drawing in as I write this and we are a week away from Halloween. Jump-scare horrors are being pushed up the Netflix algorithms and local children are bracing themselves for a year of banned Trick or Treating. We are in uncertain times, with death and pestilence on the prowl, and abject horror playing out in a languid ballet of confusion and anxiety. Ghosts are backing off for a bit; we've got scarier things to be concerned with. We've recently joined and abandoned a Whatsapp group for the houses on our street. There was neighbourly togetherness followed swiftly by neighbourly irritation as our phones trilled with screenshots of Guardian articles about tiers and local lockdowns, as if we needed it, as if we hadn't already seen it. We're all wondering about each other's psychologies, about who's to blame for the second spike, who's not following the rules. There is sniping, there is glaring, but there is still camaraderie and all-in-this-togetherness, so it all feels wonky, lopsided.

There will be new ghost stories to tell this Halloween, but the spirits will have to adapt to our new grasp of death. The hauntings of the houses of 2020 are those meaningless numbers ticking upwards on the nightly news. The 200 daily dead, unnamed, followed by interviews with pub landlords and restaurateurs, named, who are exasperated about impending closures. The audacity, we might think, of those newly-ghosted people who leave our craft ale breweries in the lurch. 

I can't see Finch now. I know he's here somewhere, nearby, and I know he'll soon reappear. But just at this moment, he's gone. 

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