The Haunting of Hill House. by JACKSON, Shirley - 1959

New York: The Viking Press, 1959. We see a horror story developing here that Lovecraft would have embraced enthusiastically" - Stephen King First edition, first printing, of this classic horror story. Jackson's penultimate novel was a finalist for the National Book Award of 1959 and is considered by many to be the definitive haunted house novel.
Stephen King remarked that The Haunting of Hill House and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw "are the only two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years" (King, quoted in Flood). In his collection of essays on horror, Danse Macabre, King gives substantial praise to Jackson's writing, suggesting that The Haunting of Hill House and Peter Straub's Ghost Story (1979) are "the greatest of the novels discussed here" (p. 382).
King praises the opening paragraph of Jackson's novel: "I think there are few if any descriptive passages in the English language that are any finer than this; it is the sort of quiet epiphany every writer hopes for: words that somehow transcend words, words which add up to a total greater than the sum of the parts" (p. 282). Octavo. Original yellow and blue cloth, spine lettered in black. With Paul Bacon dust jacket. Booksellers ticket to rear pastedown. Spine cocked, foot of spine lightly bumped. A near-fine copy in sharp jacket, spine panel a little sunned with a few short closed tears, rear panel lightly toned and soiled, 3.5 cm narrow chip to fold of front flap, edges a little nicked and rubbed, still a bright example. Alison Flood, "Textbook terror: How The Haunting of Hill House rewrote horror's rules", The Guardian, 11 Oct 2018, available online. Stephen King, Danse Macabre, 1981.