The Novel That Made My Apartment Feel Inhabited

I started The Haunting of Hill House at 10pm on a Thursday because I thought two chapters before bed would be fine. It was not fine. Shirley Jackson's novel operates through the slow accumulation of wrongness: architecture that does not follow the rules of architecture, angles that are not quite right, a narrator whose perception you stop being able to trust. By midnight I was not enjoying the book. I was enduring it and I could not stop.