The Haunting of Hill House

There were some fun and spooky parts in this book but honestly? Overall it was a letdown.

On a base level, I understand everything that happened in the plot and the personalities of the characters but this book just felt very...disjointed? Things would happen with absolutely no build-up or working towards and it would just leave me thinking “why is this happening out of the blue? why are the characters acting like this?” And maybe that could've worked if the horror of Hill House was that it messed with their minds and made them act differently but that also wasn't set up to be a plot point at all.

There were a few standard horror beats that proved that this was intended to be a scary book but nothing ever came of them. None of the scenes actually scared me because there was practically no tension besides the characters repeatedly saying “this place is creepy and I'm scared” which obviously isn't enough to build any true terror.

The ending left me completely baffled. I have no clue why any of that happened how it did and it was very unsatisfactory.