From award-winning author Elizabeth Hand comes the first ever authorized retelling of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959). A Haunting on the Hill (Mulholland Books, 2023) is a startlingly contemporary and frighteningly vivid take on one of the most well-known haunted house novels of the twentieth century.
A Haunting on the Hill follows Holly, a playwright turned private school teacher who has refused to give up on her ambitions of writing a standout drama. After she receives a grant to develop her latest play, Witching Night, she finally has the money to seek out the time—and space—to put the finishing touches on her project. During a weekend upstate with her girlfriend, Nisa, Holly discovers Hill House, a eerie and antique mansion almost hidden near a remote town that doesn’t seem hospitable to visitors. Holly falls in love with the storied environment instantly and knows its exactly the place to finish Witching Night.
Holly, Nisa, and a group of friends/actors agree to spend a handful of weeks in the house. But Hill House has a way of bringing things to the surface—and every guest has secrets, desires, and ambitions they’d prefer to keep hidden. But as they spend time in the house and strange things begin to happen—creatures in the woods, disembodied sounds, and a jagged sense of lost time—Holly and her friends begin to distrust not only the walls around them but each other as well. In uncovering what lurks at Hill House, they also discover truths about themselves better left buried.
This was a fantastic book—far more compelling that I initially expected. Hand has a propulsive writing style with a clever ability to immerse the reader in her worlds. The short chapters and intense scenes were genuinely chilling, and A Haunting on the Hill did justice to the horror of Jackson’s original text. With retellings, the original always casts a long shadow—especially with a book like this—but not only was this compulsively readable, but it felt unique and appealing as its own novel, which is a challenging balance to strike.
The propelling force of this text is the horror elements, which were genuinely disturbing and frightening. A Haunting on the Hill is the perfect blend of horror and literary fiction without being overlong or drawn out. The characters—one of which is inevitably Hill House—were perfectly complicated and their shifting allegiances/motivations made the novel that much more interesting.
I highly recommend A Haunting on the Hill for lovers of Shirley Jackson, Gothic, and horror fiction!
Please add A Haunting on the Hill to your TBR on Goodreads and see Elizabeth Hand’s website.
Content Warnings: violence, death, cheating.
Rachel Friars received her doctorate in English Literature from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada in 2024. Her current research centers on neo-Victorianism and lesbian literature and history. Her work has been published with journals such as Studies in the Novel, The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and The Palgrave Handbook of neo-Victorianism.
You can find Rachel on X @RachelMFriars or on Goodreads @Rachel Friars.
