The Haunting of Hill House

What struck me about this book is 1) how unabashedly queer this book is, not even subtext - just full on gay which was a nice thing to see be treated as normal and 2) how funny this book is. This book takes its time in the first half, really letting these character dynamics shine through in perhaps the most human way possible. They downplay the horror by making jokes without sacrificing the sincerity of the characters - it's not like the MCU where it uses bathos to defuse tension, it really is to augment the depth of these characters because it is human nature to make jokes about things. It was nice to see a book not afraid to show that side of humanity. It put these characters front and center as they all have depth in their own ways and elevates them from the usual fodder.

But what makes me not enjoy this book as much as many others do is the fact that it is just not scary. It tries to do the likes of Poe or Blackwood where much of the horror is within the minds of the characters, but there's a good chance that what is happening is real - something I've grown to not like. I want a story to go big or go home - not toe the line of what's real or what's not as things appear and disappear the following chapter without explanation. It dilutes the horror just a bit because I feel as if it was just cheating me a bit by playing both sides. In the cases of Poe or Blackwood, they earn their scares because of the prose that winds to a tension and it is told from the perspective of an unreliable narrator - something that is not the case here.

While I appreciated the attempts at characterization, it seems to focus so much more on the horror; I wanted to learn more about these characters rather than what was going on in the House.