29/10/17: Carrie Fisher – The Princess Diarist (2016)

Subtitled "A sort of memoir...", this book recollects Carrie Fisher's time on set filming Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) – or Star Wars, as it was simply known back then. The main focus is her affair with co-star Harrison Ford. She was 19. He was 33 and married with children. The first 100 pages are highly entertaining, written by the older Carrie looking back at her younger self with all of the wit and wordplay of her excellent novels and previous non-fiction books.

There then follows 68 pages from her journals of the time. These are full of self-conscious teenage angst and poetry and don't make for especially compelling material now. They lack detail of who did or said what, instead examining her emotions and fears. The entries aren’t even given dates. If you are reading this for behind-the-scenes Star Wars gossip, you will be disappointed. These pages are more interesting for the way they chart the development of Carrie Fisher as a writer: by this point she was still to learn all of the tics and tricks that would make her prose sparkle. We learn surprisingly little about Harrison Ford, other than that he was quiet, aloof and possibly even a little dull.

The final third of the book is the most fascinating. She describes how it feels to "be" Leia, the character people seem unable to separate her from, and is acutely aware of her fickle, fading fame. She's especially good when discussing the excruciating sci-fi fan conventions she reluctantly began to attend, selling autographs and meeting admirers. It would be easy for her to have savaged her slightly deranged followers, who often tell her their life stories and detail her impact on their formative years, but she learns to regard them with gratitude and humanity.

What's missing from the book is any reference to working with Harrison Ford again in the Star Wars sequels. Was it awkward? How did they get on? What happened when they had to become an on-screen couple three years after splitting as a real-world couple? And what about when the series was revived for 2015's The Force Awakens and they found themselves acting together again? Shortly after this book was published, Carrie Fisher died. With Ford preferring not to comment on their relationship, this slim book may have to be the last word on the subject.

On page 48 there's a photo of Carrie and Harrison – or “Carrison”, as she calls them – smiling together. They look impossibly young and beautiful.

01/10/17: Shirley Jackson – The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

"Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more."

This is the best haunted house story of them all. Crucially, Jackson understands that it's what you don’t see that can frighten you the most. She never destroys the brilliantly controlled build-up of tension by revealing the actual face of the evil walled up within the "clashing disharmony" of Hill House. Instead, she lets this take form in the reader's mind. This is a stroke of genius as it allows us to emphasise with Eleanor, whose own mind is being slowly filled and possessed by dark imaginings (which may, in fact, be the 'true' reality of the house). As one of the characters puts it: "an atmosphere like this one can find out the flaws and faults and weaknesses in all of us and break us apart in a matter of days".

I love the way the very architecture of the building has a harrowing awfulness about it: "Eleanor shook herself, turning to see the room complete. It had an unbelievably faulty design which left it chillingly wrong in all its dimensions, so that the walls seemed always in one direction a fraction longer than the eye could endure, and in another direction a fraction less than the barest possible tolerable length..." That wrongness is described so perfectly. (There's no way Stephen King could have written The Shining without reading this novel.)

The book is quite funny in places (notably the characters' attempts at stoical chatter to banish fear), and Jackson is especially gifted at describing the developing relationships between the four main characters. Part of the horror for Eleanor is a social one, and the conversations she struggles through brilliantly illustrate the way a bit of teasing (perhaps cruel, perhaps good-natured) may lead a fragile soul to despair.

Jackson shows how fear can corrupt the soul, and that those individuals who are open and sensitive to what's around them (e.g. Eleanor) are far more vulnerable than the thick-skinned (e.g. Mrs Montague). Furthermore, she suggests that sensitive people may be granted glimpses of a more multifaceted reality – with all the benefits of its sensory wonders and all the drawbacks of its inescapable terrors. This insight resonated deeply with me – particularly upon this second reading, during which the book seemed even richer and sadder.

This short, subtle novel achieves a great deal. Elegantly written, it's so much more than a mere ghost story.