My residence at the hill house | Shirley Jackson

Fear.. It is the hesitation of logic, voluntary abandonment of rational certainties, either you scream from it or fight it, but you cannot meet it in the middle. And how great is the blessing that you know that the creatures in the house of the hill are waiting for a chance to tell their stories, and to free themselves from being buried under misery. It is the story of four people facing the darkness, facing themselves before anything else, to discover their selves before the house reveals itself. The novel was published in 1959 and is classified as a Gothic horror novel, in which the author relied on facts that blend reality and fantasy. It is not violence in the literal sense, for Shirley here did not rely on external facts but on the psychological dimensions of the heroes contained within the story. It is the fear of the unknown as is customary for humans, their need to frame any phenomenon that may not be explainable scientifically, and perhaps the houses in Shirley's world are more of a journey into the self than a discovery of supernatural phenomena in an attempt to interpret them scientifically or even through simple observations.