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.
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 . . .
Bear with me, folks, this is going to be a tough one to write.
I very likely had the same reaction as virtually anyone else who saw there was an “authorized” follow-up (let’s not call this a sequel—I’ll get into that later) to possibly one of the top two haunted house novels of all time—the other being King’s The Shining, which saw its own disappointing sequel come out a few years back. My reaction was both incredible excitement, for a chance to read something that goes back to my favourite haunted house, but also a crossed-arm, narrow-eyed admonishment that it better not get screwed up.
I also went back and did a re-read of Jackson’s original before this, and I’m glad I did. So, let’s get into it, shall we?
To start, I should say, I actually considered Elizabeth Hand a brilliant selection, having read—and truly loved—Wylding Hall, about a band going to a haunted house to try and write and record their next album.
Good fit, right?
I thought so. I’d hoped so.
Unfortunately, Hand sort of gave us a similar scenario, only this time it was a playwright and assorted stage personnel finessing a play about a witch. Similar feel to the band thing, just with a stage play instead of an album.
And, this is where the first problems cropped up. In Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, she presented us with wholly unlikable characters. Mr and Mrs Dudley, the caretakers. Mrs. Montague. And, if we’re honest, none of the main four characters, Theodora, Eleanor, Luke, and Dr. Montague, are especially likable either. Yet Jackson just gives us very quick hints of their background, enough to intrigue, but never enough to bore. And the thoroughly unlikable Dudleys and Mrs Montague are also made fun of to the readers’ delight.
And, while it literally takes about half the original novel to dig into the horror, Jackson never bores, while filling the reader in with what they need to know prior to the not sane Hill House starts its manipulations.
In The Haunting on the Hill, Hand also chooses to make everyone unlikable, yet doesn’t seem to offer up any true redeeming features. Holly is desperate for success. Nisa is overbearingly all about her songs. Amanda wants one last shot at a meaty role. And so on.
Unfortunately, they’re all so deadly serious that there’s no fun left in them. It’s all been wrung out, leaving only desperation in its wake.
So, the characters tend to fail in this so-called sequel, but what about the story?
In the original, the four that come because one is also desperate to write a paper on a definitive house haunting, and the other three, due to their pasts or their affliations with the house, are invited.
In this new one, the house is stumbled upon, and first it’s Holly that wants the place, but it’s Nisa that is captured by the place and pushes the deal.
But the main thrust of the second story is everyone getting behind the “Witching Night” stage play, whether it’s the writing, the songs, the sound design, or the acting. Unfortunately, much like the characters, the story within the story is only mildly compelling and doesn’t feel strong enough to draw the people there, nor keep them there when things inevitably go south. Especially when the only message they hear throughout the entire novel is, “leave the house.”
And, it should be mentioned, however that if I ever experience dialogue again where one character explains they aren’t pagan, but more “neo-pagan adjacent” and they aren’t trying to be wry or funny in any way?
Yeah, if that happens, I’ll kill the book with fire and be done with it. That sentence moved up to the number one slot of most hated sentences in a novel I’ve read, and that’s something, considering up to now, it was Lee Child with his shockingly bad, “It was as distinctive as the most distinctive thing you could think of.”
But surely Jackson’s greatest creation, Hill House—such a looming and menacing presence in the first one is equally terrifying here, right?
Well, only sort of. Hand relies on weirdly external sources, such as hares (and, oh my god, Hand, just let them pick one term and run with it…every time a character refers to a rabbit, they immediately correct themselves), and the woman who lives down the road, and a snow storm…
But she does touch on certain aspects of the original, the cold spot, previous dialogue is pulled in, the room at the top of the stairs that almost claimed Eleanor.
But here’s the thing that kind of bugged me about this whole affair: Hand pay passing attention to the original with some details, which I fully appreciated. But then she creates a full ongoing history of events that occurred after the events of the first novel, not as though this book was the sequel, but as though this was about the fifth in the series, seemingly paying attention more to events from the 80s than what happened in the late 50s.
So, there’s a familiar underlying odour, but overall the entire thing smells wrong.
The closest I can come to a comparison is the experience I had doing a re-read of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, then reading Go Set a Watchman, the novel that should never have seen the light of day.
Because while it made a lot of mention of things we were familiar with in the well-loved and much-read original, it also seemed to not have as much respect as it should, and did not quite fit in with the original as it should.
This is very much the same feeling. Hand’s a great author, and she didn’t embarrass herself here, but it feels more like the estate of Jackson decided it was time to do something with this property they have, and Hand happened to have this haunted house story she’d been working on and shoehorned in some Hill House mentions to make it work. I’ve read a few reviews now that all seem to love the book and deem it a worthy successor, but for me, I guess I was hoping for something that, while not a carbon copy of the original, would at least make the house the star of the show again with its not sane presence, rather than the author bringing in completely new and, quite frankly, questionable choices as to how the house now operates. For all those glowing reviews, I know that I’ll revisit Hill House at least a few more times. But it will be the Jackson Hill House I visit. I fully expect this sequel to be forgotten in a couple of years, much like Go Set a Watchman has already slipped out of everyone’s mind, except when they come across it in the cheap book sales.
This is a decent haunted house novel, as far as it goes, but it’s not a good haunted Hill House novel by any means.
