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The Scariest TV Show I’ve Seen in Years is Also an Excellent Novel Adaptation
A Spooktacular Writing Challenge
I am not normally a huge fan of horror movies and TV shows; I have written before that while I enjoy films like The Haunting, The Innocents, The Others, and similar films that are spine-tingling, I avoid slasher films like the plague. Thus, when Buddy Gott issued the Plethora of Pop “Spooktacular Writing Challenge,” I thought he had finally thrown a writing prompt at me that I could resist.
I was wrong.
Because his prompts tend to grab a lawn chair and take up residence in my brain, I have been pondering this one since I first read it yesterday. I couldn’t do a list of the few horror films I do love, having already done that for Halloween two years ago, and published my annual spooky songs story a few days ago. I was about to admit defeat when I happened to see a book on my bookshelf that screamed the answer: Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. This article is a hybrid, part review of the novel and part review of the series.
The copy of Jackson’s novel gave me the answer to the prompt because the cover was the television series tie-in version for the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House. I normally only buy novels with the original cover, but I love the book so much I…
