Return to Hill House

Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is a classic of the horror genre, as is its 1963 film adaptation, and is considered a Must Read/See for any horror enthusiast. So when I heard that there was an authorized sequel, Elizabeth Hand's A Haunting on the Hill, I knew it was one I was going to have to check out. And what better time to do it than at the start of what folks call the Spooky Season, when many avid readers, especially ones who don't normally read horror fiction, set out to find the creepiest, most horrifying reads to devour leading up to the best holiday of all -- Halloween.

Shirley Jackson has already set the stage for Elizabeth Hand's novel: a creepy old mansion with a dark history located on the outskirts of Hillsdale, geographic location not specified, although it's assumed the town is somewhere in the New England area. Don't know why, but I always assumed it was upstate New York.

In Hand's novel, we find a small group of theater people renting out Hill House for two weeks to workshop a a dark, supernatural play, much the the dismay of the "groundskeeper," Evadne Morris, and her niece, Melissa Libby, both of whom know the house's dark history. They try warning away Holly and her group, dropping menacing hints about the bad shit that's gone down in the past, but never once coming right out and saying what exactly those things were. Even Ainsley Rowan, the realtor (and owner) for Hill House, who also has knowledge of the house's history, doesn't try too hard to dissuade the playwright from renting the house. Not even the rental contract, full of enough clauses and disclaimers freeing her from... well, from anything that might befall the party, is enough to keep Holly from going ahead with the rental. It's almost as if something is preventing them from saying too much.

From the moment they set foot in Hill House, things begin to happen, subtle at first, that the group excuses away, each for their own reasons. And therein lies the problen with Hand's novel. Don't get me wrong... I enjoyed the book immensely, but there was something lacking, and that was the subtle escalation of events that build to the climax. Also missing is the strong psychological twisting and mental decline that Jackson did so masterfully that had the reader wondering: Is Nell a little unhinged (she was) or was it the house (it was)? Hand fails to deliver to us a fragile Nell-like character for the house to play with, and as a result, while we read on to find out what happens, we never become fully invested in any of the characters, not to the point we were with Jackson's Nell, and while we want to know what happens to them, we never truly fear for them.

The other thing I found mildly disappointing was the lack of reference to Jackson's original work. Here you have an authorized sequel, but never once are there specific references to the events that transpired all those years ago. They're alluded to, like the car and the stump, but there's nothing specific. Not even Stevie, when he recounts what he's learned from Googling Hill House, mentions Markway, Nell, or any of the events at that time. He mentions more recent transient residents of the house, but nothing about those events nor of the history of the house itself and the tragedy of the original family.

Those things aside, it shouldn't prevent you from enjoying Hand's novel for what it is -- a mildly creepy haunted house story. I would suggest listening to the audiobook on this one (I did), as the sound effects and hearing the old folk songs sung create a sense of atmosphere that brings out the spookiness of the narrative. More than once I found myself looking around for the source of sounds before realizing they were coming from the book itself, which was just a tad bit unsettling, making it the ideal book to start off the Spooky Season with. 4.5/5 stars