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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 . . .
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0I am a huge fan of Shirley Jackson's Hill House to the point where I have a tattoo of it planned for me. I was hesitant about this book, but ultimately very excited. For the Jackson estate to authorize this, I thought, meant it must be fantastic. To go a bit more casual than I normally do with reviews...y'all this was so bad. It was poorly organized, choppy, irritating, and scanty in format. The inclusion of songs was creative, but handled with a lack of skill and none were memorable. The characters were unlikeable which is entirely forgivable, but they were ultimately uncompelling, which is the penultimate literary sin. The ultimate sin of this book for me was it's complete departure from the spirit of its predecessor. If someone had told me Hand only read Hill House once 20 years ago for school and thought it was only so-so, I'd believe that without hesitation. I DNF'd halfway through.
0this was such a let down but the atmospheric audiobook helped a little. I very recently read The Haunting of Hill House and that had me theorizing and analyzing. I enjoyed those characters and the weirdness of Hill House and loved that experience. A Haunting on the Hill sadly did not get remotely close to the source, and for being a known in canon story that’s disappointing. These characters are the worst to be with, I do not care a second about their drama or egos. They do nothing for this story and the central plot of a playwright rehearsing just isn’t interesting. I wanted scary. I wanted the house. I wanted to think and theorizes. This book has nothing happen until the last 25 pages and by then I don’t care. My favorite part of the book was the hares cause they’re cool and creepy but that’s not enough to carry this book.
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