A Haunting on the Hill
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Average rating3.3
From award-winning author Elizabeth Hand comes the first-ever novel authorized to return to the world of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House--a "scary and beautifully written" (Neil Gaiman) new story of isolation and longing perfect for our present time. **Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Harper's Bazaar** Open the door . . . . Holly Sherwin has been a struggling playwright for years, but now, after receiving a grant to develop her play Witching Night, 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 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 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 . . . "A fitting--and frightening--homage." --New York Times Book Review "It's thrilling to find this is a true hybrid of these two ingenious women's work--a novel with all the chills of Jackson that also highlights the contemporary flavor and evocative writing of Hand." --Washington Post "Only the brilliant Elizabeth Hand could so expertly honor Jackson's rage, wit, and vision." --Paul Tremblay "Eerily beautiful, strangely seductive, and genuinely upsetting." --Alix E. Harrow
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I am grateful to have received an eARC of this title to review from @netgalley. A HAUNTING ON THE HILL by Elizabeth Hand is a spooky return to the world of Shirley Jackson's THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE. Hand's novel is nothing short of a triumph, creating a book for 2023 readers that propels many of the themes and ideas in Jackson's timeless original into the present century. The motif of theatre is woven into much of the narrative, with the idea that actors may be possessed by their characters a central concept of the novel. Yet, what if the character doing the possessing is no divine muse but rather Jackson's absolute reality under which no organism can remain sane? When Holly, Nisa, Stevie, and Amanda arrive at Hill House to rehearse Holly's new play, this is the question they will unwittingly explore. In many ways this book takes ideas and pieces of the original and twists or refreshes them for both fans of Jackson and new readers alike. Where Jackson wrote of spiritualism, Hand writes of Wicca and neopaganism. Hand allows a sapphic romance to live, breathe, and struggle on the page: combining both the subtle hints of a queer relationship between Eleanor and Theodora and the dysfunctional relationship of Eleanor and her sister. The theme of a demented place, a house that feeds upon its inhabitants and pulls at the strings binding their relationships and very sanity to the point of unraveling floats to the surface in Hand's books just as it did in Jackson's. In a major stylistic departure from Jackson, Hand has ramped up the scares, and presents a book that will please modern horror readers who might find Jackson too much of a slow-burn. Although a case could be made that every character in the book is unlikable, I somehow still enjoyed getting to spend time with each one. Some questions were left unanswered, but perhaps some mysteries in Hill House are best left to walk alone. Overall ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
