‘It’s not a simple matter. You can drain the water or grit the ice, or move the wall. It makes no difference in the end. It’s just a bad spot here, and always has been. A crossroads. The place where they buried folk like suicides and murderers. Witches. Bury them at the crossroads so their spirits get confused and can’t find their way home.’ [loc. 2112]
The never-named narrator of Hare House has been forced to give up teaching: on a holiday to Scotland, she impulsively decides to move to a cottage adjoining Hare House. She achieves a painful facsimile of friendship with Janet, who lives in the other cottage, and befriends the Hendersons, who live in Hare House: Cass (seventeen and beautiful) and her older brother Grant. (Their brother Rory died 'a hero', quite recently.) The house is ... eccentrically decorated, with Victorian taxidermy tableaux featuring stuffed hares in a variety of improbable poses. And hares, of course, feature in the local folklore: there's a story of a witch, killed while in the shape of a hare, only regaining her human form after death. The narrator is reminded of the hare she encountered on first arrival, mortally wounded by a collision with traffic, dying slowly in front of her because she didn't have the courage to kill it. And she thinks of Janet, her uncharitable neighbour, of whom Cass warns 'well, you know she's a witch, of course'. But can Cass be trusted to tell the truth? Her stories about her dead brother may not be strictly true, and she claims that the whole family is under a curse.
Entwined with this story, and perhaps underlying the Hendersons' changing attitudes to our protagonist, is the backstory of just why she was 'forced to give up teaching', and the modern witch-hunt that drove her out of her profession. In a reversal of the more usual trope, the narrator becomes rather less likeable as the novel progresses. She's a lonely middle-aged woman, embittered by 'the months and years of a life deferred': it's never entirely clear whether the Hendersons come to know of the scandal in her past, or whether they have drawn conclusions (accurate or not) about her culpability for some of the less pleasant events of a cold, isolating rural winter.
Hare House was tremendously atmospheric, Gothic in its sensibilities and to some extent its characters: but it never really resolved the issue of whether supernatural or 'merely' psychological forces were at work, and the finale was less dramatic than the rest of the novel had suggested.
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