Month: October 2018

Enlarge / Literature's most famous haunted house is back for the best adaptation yet. (credit: Steve Dietl/Netflix)

The quintessential ghost story is back to haunt your dreams with the recent debut of The Haunting of Hill House, Netflix's new miniseries adaptation of Shirley Jackson's classic 1959 gothic horror novel. Frankly, it's less an adaptation than a bold reimagining that still remains true to the rich metaphorical depths of the titular source material.

No less an authority than Stephen King cited the original Haunting of Hill House as one of the finest horror novels of the late 20th century in his nonfiction overview of the genre, Danse Macabre. His 2002 miniseries Rose Red was an homage of sorts. Jackson's novel has already been adapted twice for the big screen: once in 1963 and again in 1999. The former film is considered a classic. The less said about the overwrought 1999 adaptation, the better, despite a stellar cast that included Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Owen Wilson, and Lili Taylor.

This latest version is the best by far. Even though it veers sharply from the original storyline, there are sufficient nods to the novel throughout to keep the staunchest fan happy. The Haunting of Hill House offers up plenty of bone-chilling horror, but like all the best ghost stories, that horror is rooted in the complexities of the human psyche. At its heart, this is a story of family trauma and dysfunction, turning Jackson's psychological subtext into text.

Enlarge / Crowded conditions at the Andersonville POW camp. (credit: US National Archives)

"It is hard on our men held in Southern prisons not to exchange them, but it is humanity to those left in the ranks to fight our battles." – General Ulysses S. Grant, August 18, 1864.

General Grant did not halt the exchange of Union and Confederate soldiers between the summers of 1863 and 1864, although this quotation—chiseled into a monument on the site of Camp Sumter military prison in Andersonville, Georgia—is often cited as evidence that he did. The exchange halted as a consequence of the Emancipation Proclamation. Black Union soldiers started enlisting in increasing numbers, and the Confederates refused to trade them along with their white officers.

Once the exchange stopped, prisons got more and more crowded and more and more squalid. Malnutrition and disease were rampant. And, according to a new study, the consequences lasted for generations.