From three-time Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, and Nebula Award-winning author Elizabeth Hand comes the first-ever authorized novel to return to the world of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House: a suspenseful, contemporary, and terrifying story of longing and isolation all its own.
Holly Sherwin has been a struggling playwright for years, but now, after receiving a grant to develop her play, The Witch of Edmonton, she may finally be close to her big break. All she needs is time and space to bring her vision to life. When she stumbles across Hill House on a weekend getaway upstate, she is immediately taken in by the ornate, if crumbling, gothic mansion, nearly hidden outside a remote village. It’s enormous, old, and ever-so eerie—the perfect place to develop and rehearse her play.
Despite her own hesitations, Holly’s girlfriend, Nisa, agrees to join Holly in renting the house out for a month, and soon a troupe of actors, each with ghosts of their own, arrive. Yet as they settle in, the house’s peculiarities are made known: strange creatures stalk the grounds, disturbing sounds echo throughout the halls, and time itself seems to shift. All too soon, Holly and her friends find themselves at odds not just with one another, but with the house itself. It seems something has been waiting in Hill House all these years, and it no longer intends to walk alone
- Title: A Haunting on the Hill
- Author: Elizabeth Hand
- Publisher: Mulholland Books
- Publication Date: October 3rd, 2023
- Genre: Horror
- Targeted Age Range: Adult
- Content Warnings: mentions of the COVID-19 pandemic, infidelity, mentions of past grooming and sexual abuse, mentions of suicide, death (on page), blood
- Rating: ★★★.5
When I think of a haunted house, I immediately think of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. I’ll be honest with you though, while I love the setting of Hill House, Jackson’s original novel was not my cup of tea — I found the atmosphere lacking and that there wasn’t enough horror for my taste. However, the Mike Flanagan Netflix series of the same name that was inspired by Jackson’s book is one of my favorite series of all time. All that is to say, because of my deep fascination with the fictional haunted house, when I heard that Elizabeth Hand’s latest novel, A Haunting on the Hill, was set at the Hill House, I knew I had to read it.
A Haunting on the Hill follows struggling playwright Holly Sherwin and her singer-songwriter girlfriend Nisa as the two escape the hustle and bustle of New York City so that Holly can finish her current work in progress, Witching Night. While exploring a small town upstate, Holly stumbles upon Hill House and is immediately enraptured. She knows that this will be the perfect place for them to finish workshopping her play about Elizabeth Sawyer, a woman who was accused of witchcraft and murdered in 1621. Despite warnings from the locals, Holly successfully rents Hill House for two weeks, and Holly, Nisa, her best friend Stevie Leddell, and infamous actress Amanda Greer head to Hill House. However, the longer they stay, the harder it becomes to tell fact from fiction, and they soon discover that they may not all get out alive.
When it comes to haunted house stories, I am big on the atmosphere. I want to feel like I am in that haunted house, and I want to feel as scared or trapped or isolated as the characters do. In some ways, I think that A Haunting on the Hill delivered that, and in some ways, it was lacking. Right off the bat, there was an unsettling feeling about this story that I loved — the characters, location, and tone all had a disturbing undertone, and you just knew that there was something brewing underneath the surface waiting to be revealed, and I thought that was really well done.
My favorite thing about the writing was that I couldn’t always tell what was real, and what wasn’t. Part of why I love Hill House so much is that it is able to manipulate the people in the house — it gets into their heads and makes them think or imagine things that align with the desires of the house, and there were times when I was reading where something would be described and I’d sit there after reading it and think, “did that really happen, or did Hill House make the characters see that?” It oftentimes felt like the lines between reality and fiction were blurred, which I think is absolutely needed for a story like this. There were also moments of foreshadowing that I thought were done really well, and if you’ve watched the show, there were some things kind of similar to the “bent neck lady” that I loved and wanted more of.
The big letdown for me, really, was that it wasn’t scary enough. As I mentioned, there were a lot of unsettling moments, some moments that grossed me out, and some moments that made me feel really nervous, but there was nothing that terrified me. I wanted more in-your-face moments of terror. Especially since the locals were always saying “leave” or “Hill House isn’t safe” which is clear based on how weird everything surrounding the house was, but I would’ve loved if those characters gave us a little more insight into Hill House’s history and why it was so dangerous.
I really liked that we got to read the story from multiple points of view. While I didn’t feel particularly connected to any of the characters — in fact a few of them I really didn’t like — I thought all of them were great characters to follow. The most interesting thing was to see how they all reacted to different situations, and seeing how Hill House affected their thoughts, personalities, and reactions. Additionally, it was great to really learn their deep fears and desires through the things that the house showed them and influenced them to do.
Something that I do think hindered my enjoyment as a whole was that I had to take a lot of breaks while reading because of my schedule. I think my overall enjoyment would’ve been a bit higher if I had been able to sit and read it straight through without stopping. So, if you’re planning on reading this one, I would dedicate an entire day to reading it! Furthermore, I think my opinions on the original novel and the television show did impact my enjoyment a bit, because there were times when I was thinking “Oh, I’m enjoying this more than the original book” or “They did something similar in the show and it was creepier there” — however, this is very much so a personal expectation and doesn’t really have anything to do with the book itself, but I do think it’s important to mention.
So, overall, while I didn’t necessarily get everything I wanted out of A Haunting on the Hill I did enjoy reading it, and it’s made me think about picking up more of Elizabeth Hand’s work. I think that if you’re looking for a haunted house story that has its scary moments but won’t make you terrified to go to sleep at night, you should pick this one up.
Links for A Haunting on the Hill: Goodreads | TheStoryGraph | Bookshop
Elizabeth Hand is the author of twenty genre-spanning novels and five collections of short fiction and essays. Her work has received multiple Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy and Nebula Awards, among other honors, and have been chosen as Notable Books by the New York Times and Washington Post. Her critically acclaimed novels featuring Cass Neary, “one of literature’s great noir anti-heroes” [Katherine Dunn] is being developed as a UK streaming series, and several of her other works have been optioned for film and TV. She is a longtime reviewer for the Washington Post Book World, and has written for numerous publications, including the L.A. Times, Salon, the Boston Review, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Much of her work focuses on artists and performers, particularly those outside the mainstream, as well as on the impacts of climate change. She is on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing, and for over thirty years has led myriad writing workshops, including Clarion West, Clarion, Odyssey, the Yale Writer’s Conference, Pike’s Peak Writer’s Conference, The Writer’s Hotel, and recently, the debut Salam Writer’s Workshop in Lahore, Pakistan and a futurist workshop at Wytham Abbey, Oxford, UK. She divides her time between the Maine coast and North London. You can find her on Twitter @liz_hand and on Facebook @ElizabethHandAuthor.
Great review! I think it’s cool that you mentioned sometimes it was hard to differ between what was real or not, I love books like that haha
thank you! that was definitely one of the things i liked most about the book, and i love when authors can do that