2025/126: A Haunting on the Hill — Elizabeth Hand

“If you’re scared, channel that into Tomasin.”
“He’s a demon. He doesn’t get scared.”
“So tap into that. You’re a demon in a big spooky house—you should feel right at home.”
“I do...That’s what scares me.” [p. 176]

This isn't exactly a sequel to The Haunting of Hill House: it's more of a tribute, with a rather different ambience. Instead of the tight third-person narrative of Eleanor, there's a first-person narrative from Holly Sherwin -- a never-quite-successful playwright working on a play about witches -- as well as third-person chapters from the perspective of Holly's girlfriend Nisa, a singer-songwriter; Amanda, an ageing actress with a murky past; and Stevie, Holly's best friend, who's acting in the play and doing the sound. Holly finds Hill House when she's on a weekend break with Nisa, and it seems the perfect place to rehearse and workshop her play -- despite the odd decor, the peculiar housekeeper, the knife-wielding neighbour... 'It felt like it was always the middle of the night, and not in a good way' [p. 198]

Gradually, the characters' flaws and failings are revealed, and tensions rise. The ambience isn't the brittle gaiety and flirtation of Jackson's original, but each of the characters experiences something strange, and each reveals a darker side. Perhaps it's the house ('demented', says Melissa the housekeeper), or the huge black hares (cue Nisa singing about hares on the mountain), or the deafening sounds that don't register on Stevie's recordings. Or perhaps it's the pressure of Holly's expectations, or the secrets that all of them are keeping.

I didn't find A Haunting on the Hill as unsettling as The Haunting of Hill House: perhaps because we know what everyone in the house (or, at least, the quartet of viewpoint characters) is thinking and feeling,  or perhaps because the setting is more modern and familiar. But I did like the way that Hand, like Jackson, never points the camera directly at the source of the unease, never tries to explain it. There are hints of the house's history going back to Eleanor, and further: deaths, suicides, a lost child, a poisoning. The novel's denouement is more explicitly horrific than Jackson's ending, more of an intrusion into the physical world. Paradoxically, this reduced the chill factor for me. But this time, at least, we get to see what happens afterwards.