It took me a few days to finish Shirley Jackson's The Haunting despite the brevity of the text. In what has been a busy period with regard to the Toad, work, I found myself enjoying just three or four pages of her chiller late at night, not wanting to rush and fail to do justice to a deceptively easy-to-read classic of its kind. The best pages are genuinely frightening in their evocation of the otherness of the house, and the weakest - those concerning the two late arrivals to the scene who, rightly, were omitted from both film versions - are interesting in terms of bringing in something quite unexpected in terms of the usual rules of the genre.
Strangely enough after completing The Haunting I found myself re-reading Purple Hibiscus at high speed, devouring it over two days, just to get the old reading muscles going again.
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