The Haunting of Hill House

King has praised Hill House at length in Danse Macabre, calling it one of the few great supernatural novels of the century, and quotes its opening paragraph as a model. The Overlook is built to Jackson's specification: an isolated building with a recorded history of deaths, a small party sealed inside it, and a haunting that works by selecting the most vulnerable person present and speaking in their own voice. Eleanor is chosen by the house; so is Jack Torrance.

Both novels make the architecture the antagonist rather than putting a ghost inside it. Jackson's house is described as wrong in its angles, with doors that will not stay open and a floor plan nobody can hold in their head; Danielewski's house is a quarter of an inch larger inside than out, and then a good deal more than that. The move is the same one, measuring a building and finding the measurement impossible, and Danielewski takes it from implication to the literal fact the whole book is about.

James built the device Jackson perfected: a haunting told by somebody whose account you cannot trust, so the reader never learns whether the house is haunted or the woman is unwell. The governess and Eleanor Vance occupy the same position, an isolated unmarried woman given charge of something in a large house, and both stories refuse to resolve which reading is true. Jackson admired James and the debt has been traced by critics since Hill House was published.