The Haunting Of Hill house: Slow-burn subtle horror books.

Shirley Jackson published The Haunting Of Hill House in 1959, and thanks to a recent Netflix adaptation, its popularity lives on. Known especially for its hallmark Gothic horror story and the unreliable narrator, this psychologically suspenseful ghost story is a modern classic.

Hunting for evidence of the occult, Dr Montague invites three participants to Hill House: Theodora, his lovely assistant; Luke, set to inherit the estate; and Eleanor, a fragile young woman with a troubled past. As The House takes hold, Jackson plumbs the depths of the human condition, asking the electric question: will any of them make it out? This definitive horror novel blurs the lines between reality and imagination, between dream and nightmare. Beautiful, atmospheric and utterly terrifying, Jackson’s magnum opus examines the shadows that lurk not just in cobwebbed corners, but in the facets of our very minds.

The Haunting Of Hill House has been one major source of inspiration for me and my own ghost stories.

Slow horror is coming back, and it’s one of the best ways to tell a ghost story, if not the best. In cinema we have plenty of cheap thrills and jump scares, but the unsettling, indescribable unease we feel when reading a ghost story cannot be beat.

Another hair-raising subtle horror book that inspired The Spider was Susan Hill’s The Woman In Black. This is a story set in Edwardian England where a young lawyer Arthur Kipps travels north to sort the estate of the late Mrs Drablow. When he arrives at the village near where she lived in her isolated, island home, he finds that there is something the villagers do not wish to talk about: The Woman In Black.

I adore both of these classic stories and wanted to create a similar sense of unease with my own occult detective series: The Muldoon Mysteries. When I started writing The Spider, it was just a ghost story. After watching Mike Flanagan’s recent adaptation of The Haunting Of Hill House I decided to go deeper. What could be worse than a haunting? How can the ghost be an integral part of a bigger story? That’s where Muldoon comes in.

Who is Daniel Muldoon?

Daniel Muldoon is an Occult Detective, appearing as a paranormal investigator in The Spider. He assists the Liverpool City Police with uncanny cases involving the paranormal and the occult. Muldoon arrives at Percy Street believing that he will be dealing with a case of demonic possession. What he finds is just the beginning of the horror that will unfold.

Loved The Haunting Of Hill House? The Spider was released in December 2025.

I just recently finished Hanna Delaney’s The Spider, so here are some of my (spoiler free) thoughts on the book: first thought, you should go read it for yourself. Second thought, et al: The Spider is a slow burn of uneasiness and unknowns. It’s broken into two halves in the way a book like Finders Keepers by Stephen King is, or an Arthur Conan Doyle story. It kept me guessing and invested the entire time, it’s got loads of hair-raising subtle horror, much like Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House — I find this form of subtle atmospheric horror to be much more effective than the the jump-scare type, so it was right up my alley. It’s equal parts paranormal horror and detective mystery, vaguely reminiscent of Lockwood and Co. books. I will definitely read more Muldoon stories. It’s very well written and I think it’s shining aspect is the character dialogue — it’s excellent, with unique characters that have personality and depth.

Read the original review by Keith Long here.

The Spider is a Gothic Horror novel set in late-Victorian Liverpool.