This is a spoiler-free lightly revised version of the brief review of Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill (2023) that I posted on Goodreads.
Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is a beloved novel whose fans have opinions. Strong opinions. Having published one of the critical essays on Hill House in editor Kristopher Woofter’s Bram Stoker Award nominated essay collection Shirley Jackson: A Companion (2021), I also have strong opinions.
One might even say I can be a huge ass about Hill House.
Yes, one might say that.
Nevertheless, I’m an Elizabeth Hand fan and I understood A Haunting on the Hill to be set in Jackson’s Hill House but not an attempt to retell the original story or rewrite the house’s history, so I think I was pretty open-minded going in – despite the fact that Hand’s premise puts a playwright and a bunch of actors in the house to workshop a new play.
Okay, cards on the table. Having, in my youth – wrangled actors in allegedly haunted locations for a lot less money than the whole melodramatic experience was worth, I did have a couple reservations about the premise while waiting for my copy to arrive.
I thought Hand did a nice job or incorporating a number of turns of phrase of details into the story that generally go unremarked on even by ardent Hill House fans, and I look forward to a careful reread and perhaps a conversation with Hand someday because I’m certain there are details gleaned from early drafts of Jackson’s novel that one would only know by sitting down at the Library of Congress and digging in to Shirley’s papers and that delights me, whether Hand did that work or merely channeled Shirley, the result is great fun. But honestly, it was the moment when we learned that Hand’s character Amanda drove a Morris Minor that fully opened my heart, as I can’t see one of those sleek little sports cars without thinking about how much Shirley Jackson loved her own Morris and what a terror she was reputed to be behind the wheel.
(Without spoilers) there were a few elements I wish Hand had developed a bit more and I was tempted to give A Haunting on the Hill 4 stars. but the fact that I devoured it in a day and that (surprisingly early on) I quit picturing the characters as people I know and simply heard them as their own individual selves inclined me to push this up to 5 stars.
A Haunting on the Hill stands on its own, and readers unacquainted with Jackson’s work or any of the fanciful film or television adaptations which stray from the source material but lend a certain familiarity to the story won’t have any trouble getting lost in this creepy house along with Hand’s cast of characters. I can see how fans of Jackson’s work may take umbrage with the conceit Hand offers, but I think it’s worth remembering that Jackson’s Hill House was a place seemingly with a will of its own. From my perspective, the most tantalizing descriptions of that power are offered to us from the perspectives of unreliable narrators and willful women pushing back against the constricting machinations of patriarchy and capitalism and heteronormativity. Hand operates in the same register as Jackson in this regard, and her Hill House is an engaging and alluring and repellent place well worth visiting this Halloween season.
