In 1959, Shirley Jackson published “The Haunting of Hill House,” an iconic work of gothic fiction that explores the fallout among a group of paranormal enthusiasts as they investigate a haunted house. The novel was that rare beast in genre fiction — a horror novel that was both a critical and commercial success, a bestseller nominated for a National Book Award and adapted into a film starring Julie Harris and Claire Bloom. It went on to become a touchstone for writers aspiring to tell stories that capture the thrill of the supernatural through character-driven plotting and well-crafted prose. Jackson died six years after “The Haunting of Hill House” was published, when she was only 48 years old, leaving her fans to wonder what treasures she might have created, had she only had more time.
It isn’t surprising, then, that Elizabeth Hand’s novel, “A Haunting on the Hill,” the first authorized novel set in the world of Jackson’s Hill House, would be an exciting and risky venture. Coming to the book, fans of Jackson will inevitably expect to experience the same haunted mansion that she created, with all its eerie oddities, while fans of Hand — a beloved author who has written more than a dozen genre-crossing and award-winning novels — will want to hear her particular voice and her uncanny ability to combine the edgy and the ethereal. It’s a difficult high wire to walk. Bringing these two heavy-hitting novelists together could alienate fans of both.
And so it’s thrilling to find that “A Haunting on the Hill” is a true hybrid of these two ingenious women’s work — a novel with all the chills of Jackson that also highlights the contemporary flavor and evocative writing of Hand. The story stays true to Jackson’s vision of “Hill House” while becoming a thing of its own. Indeed, “A Haunting on the Hill” is strange and wonderful, a frightening foray into the supernatural that will inspire you to go back and reread the original.
At the center of Hand’s novel is Holly, a playwright who has received a grant to adapt and stage a play called “Witching Night.” Holly’s play is based on an older work, a Jacobean dud called “The Witch of Edmonton.” It’s a play based on an older play in a novel based on an older novel, a bit of meta-narrative that deepens the doubling of these two novels like a hall of mirrors. With her new largesse, Holly and her girlfriend, Nisa, a singer whose voice “fills a room like water fills a crystal tumbler,” go Upstate to work in a “jeweled village” four hours from New York City.
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When Holly stumbles upon Hill House, she’s instantly pulled in by its dark magnetism. “Deeply strange” and “obviously implausible” things begin to happen — a crazed woman rushes after Holly’s car with a hunting knife, and an ominous black hare begins to morph before Holly’s eyes. “Its body extended, growing longer and longer and thinner and thinner, as though made of some substance other than flesh and fur and bone, until it seemed that it might snap like a piece of Silly Putty stretched too far.” When Holly takes photos of the house, they come out faded, and while briefly looking at the place from the front stoop, almost four hours seem to disappear from the clock. Strange premonitions, to be sure.
And yet, despite these warnings, Holly is intrigued by Hill House and rents it as a space where she will work on the play. Holly and Nisa invite the lead actress, Amanda, who hasn’t had a significant role in years, and a vape-smoking, pill popping friend, Stevie, with whom Nisa shares a secret. Almost immediately, bad things begin to happen. A nor’easter blows through, and the black hare — which isn’t a black hare at all, Nisa believes — returns. Lights flicker through the misty darkness of the rooms, and one watches with horror as the house wakes and prepares to unleash itself on these innocents.
Or are they so innocent? Nisa and Stevie aren’t the only ones with a secret. Twenty years earlier, Holly’s first play was inspired by — or perhaps stolen from — a woman from the Blue Ridge Mountains named Macy-Lee Barton, who claimed to have had a child with a ghost. After Holly wrote the play, dramatizing Macy-Lee’s life, she accused Holly of plagiarism. Macy-Lee is Holly’s “dark door,” one she knows “better than to open.” But that is precisely what Hill House does — pries open what’s been suppressed — and it’s only a matter of time before Macy-Lee returns to Holly. That Macy-Lee “looked a bit like Nisa, dark-haired and dark-eyed” doesn’t bode well, either.
As in Jackson’s novel, the group is slowly undone, overtaken physically and psychologically by Hill House. Jackson’s readers will be pleased to find that Hand incorporates many of the original architectural features of the house, the gables and the nursery and the tower, which Hand describes as warm in the middle of winter. “Like the rest of Hill House,” Nisa thinks as she ventures up into the tower, “the tower seemed to generate its own weather.” It is a moment that will make any lover of the original novel squirm with dread, and it is but one of the many terrifying pleasures of returning to Hill House.
Danielle Trussoni is the best-selling author of seven books. Her new novel is “The Puzzle Master.”
A Haunting on the Hill
By Elizabeth Hand
Mulholland. 326 pp. $30
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