Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader will stick with the literature meme for this installment of Friday Villainy. This week, our theme is pyschological villainy. For your reading pleasure, your Maximum Leader reproduces for you the first paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House.”

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. 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. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Your Maximum Leader believes that this is possibly the strongest opening paragaph of any story in the “horror/thriller” genre. It grabbed your Maximum Leader when he first read the story many years ago. And it still gives your villainous Maximum Leader a little chill every time he reads it.

Carry on.