By Elizabeth Hand
I was a big admirer of Hand’s horror mystery thriller Generation Loss, which first won her the 2008 Shirley Jackson award. It seemed the planets were aligned for me to read A Haunting on the Hill: it was the exact same price as The Bee Sting, so the clerk was able to do a clean exchange for me. I was really looking forward to starting 2024 with a new release!
The novel begins with Holly and her girlfriend Nisa taking a weekend break away from NYC. Holly is a struggling playwright who got a lucky break with a $10,000 grant to produce The Witching Hour -- a passion project inspired by Elizabeth Sawyer, who was accused of witchcraft and executed in 17th c. New England. Nisa, a singer-songwriter obsessed with murder ballads, will compose the music and perform the songs on stage with the actors.
While out on a drive, Holly discovers Hill House. She had been searching for a retreat, a place where her performers could rehearse, do read-throughs and collaborate on the development of the play. She manages to find the local real estate agent, Ainsley, who happens to own Hill House. Ainsley is reluctant at first, but agrees to rent Hill House to Holly for the week.
Holly brings on board Stevie, a sound designer who was a former child stage actor, and Amanda Greer, a lauded theatre actor who was involved in an unfortunate accident that somewhat rerailed her career. At first I was a little wary, as the four main characters are self-involved theatre types. What kind of eye-rolling antics would I have to endure with a bunch of clashing egos thrown into a claustrophobic haunted house. Holly has been frustrated by her stagnant career path and considers the grant her one chance at breaking out as a successful playwright, so she’s determined to make this work, no matter how her gut keeps screaming out there is something terribly wrong with Hill House
Holly’s gf Nisa is probably the most annoying character of the four. Blessed with a beautiful voice, she’s constantly trying to “test the acoustics" by belting out her compositions. And with an innate talent for penning melancholy folk songs, she has a promising musical career, yet deep-down she’s suspicious that Holly wants to reign her in. She’s also narcissistic and having a secret affair with Stevie.
Stevie is one of Holly’s best friends. As a former child stage actor, he was sexually abused by an older costar, and has grown up dealing wit his past trauma with drugs and hedonism. Hill House first “reveals” itself to Stevie by giving him the illusion of a safe space in the form of a secret door that’s meant just for him.
Like Nisa, Amanda also likes to command attention, yet unlike Nisa, she is horribly insecure. Her being older than the others doesn’t help either. It’s important to note that all three women are desperate to either revive or kickstart their respective careers, and this desperation is what binds them to Hill House.
Overall, I found A Haunting on the Hill to be extremely disappointing, almost to the point of being badly written. First, I had no connection with any of the characters. Yes, they were immature, unlikeable theatre people, but writers like Patricia Highsmith had a way of making unpleasant characters relatable, or at the very least, fascinating. Hand herself had created one of the most deeply flawed characters in Cass Neary, yet I could still relate to Cass’ foibles. The four main characters in A Haunting on the Hill were too self-obsessed to truly care for anyone. Second, the story wasn't even remotely creepy, let alone scary. The black menacing hares of unusual size did absolutely nothing for me. What made Shirley Jackson’s novel so effective was, as the reader, you were never sure whether the house was truly haunted, or whether all the inexplicable occurrences were all in Eleanor’s mind.
The pacing was also off somehow. There wasn’t any sense of impending doom that ever got properly built up. The novel was written in the first person from Holly’s POV, yet equal time was spent inside the heads of Nisa, Stevie and Amanda. Holly didn’t have a particularly unique perspective, so I thought it was strange that Hand didn’t use the third person to narrate (which Jackson did for The Haunting of Hill House).
Now she grew angry. They were supposed to all be in this together, with the same goal: the play. Yet there was Stevie, upstaging her in the parlor, pulling out all the stops as that damned dog. Her voice and her songs were what knit the entire story together, even Holly had admitted that.
And where was her reward? Nisa had brought beauty and a sense of ancient mystery to Holly’s words. She’d infused them with a power and terror that echoed down through centuries unitl Nisa held them, protected them, shared them with those she thought she could trust with something so precious.
But all they could see and hear were their own voices. Petty. Selfish. Greedy. Deaf to beauty when it rang out.
Hand went deeply into everyone’s past issues, and Hill House amplified their destructive neuroses and desires, yet
everyone still felt so two-dimensional, and awful. Holly,
Nisa, Stevie, and Amanda were mostly bickering, bitchy theatre types. The three women who watched over Hill House -- Ainsely, Melissa, and Evadne -- were even more thinly drawn. They were supposed to be good witches yet their motives or histories were never developed. Perhaps Hand wanted to keep them mysterious
or inscrutable, but they did nothing to propel the narrative. They didn't even provide any substantial backstory to Hill House. There
was also something about a family who had lived in Hill House during 80's and a teenaged son who had disappeared, but this is only briefly
alluded to. Ainsley had agreed to rent
out Hill House too easily despite knowing the danger she’d be putting her
renters in. She also never reappeared again. Only Melissa and
Evadne made half-hearted attempts to convince the occupants to leave before the
forecasted October snow storm. When
Melissa mentioned “it was too late”, she just took off!
It would’ve made more sense if Ainsley had more of a connection with the house and was making excuses to rent it out, ie. nothing bad had happened there for a long time, and she needed the money, when in actual fact, the house wanted to be “fed” a la Burnt Offerings (which I still need to watch). There could’ve been interpersonal conflicts between Ainsely, Melissa and Evadne (which would provide a nice counterpoint to Holly, Nisa and Amanda). And Melissa and Evadne could’ve swooped in at the last minute to extricate Holly, Amanda and Stevie (because there had to be one sacrificial victim – it’s a horror thriller after all!). But this never happened.
Though Stevie himself had felt it, too, in the parlor, that primal thrill as he felt himself fold into someone else. Something else…
He knew from Holly’s expression that his performance had already surpassed whatever she’d hoped for. He still felt it, a flash of the intense charge he got when he’d nailed a part a shivery current that ran through his entire body, everything seeming to tremble, on the verge of coming apart. The others had laughed when Amanda talked about actors being possessed, but he knew that she was right.
It had been years since he’d felt it, like a drug he’d forsaken. Only this wasn’t bad for him, like drugs. This was what he’d needed, all along. This was what he’d been secretly praying for, the chance to give himself over to something more powerful than himself. The muse, an old acting teacher called it.
I really liked the idea of having a group of actors unknowingly channelling the latent power of Hill House during their rehearsals, much like the psychics in Jackson’s original story. The characters were definitely seeing and hearing things that didn’t make sense. But the sightings of the menacing big black hare didn’t make much narrative or symbolic sense - it just left me scratching my head. And that secret door leading to a psychedelic passageway just seemed kind of silly.
Many ideas that had any potential ended up feeling half-baked. I mentioned
the pacing - it took far too long for things to happen. Like Stevie finally opening that damned secret
door near the end. Then the storm came and the strange knocking.
Then Nisa snuck up to the door because she couldn’t stand the fact that
Stevie would keep something like this from her, but like an idiot, ended up
getting trapped inside the bowels of the house. It was all kind of
rushed. Too much time was spent on four annoying characters and their bitchy
interpersonal dynamics, their flaws and insecurities on repeat. Not
enough effort spent creating an effective or marginally scary horror story.
In the end, it was Nisa who got “eaten” by Hill House, not Holly. A year later, Holly was still able to produce her play with Amanda Greer as the star and using recordings of Nisa’s music. But it wasn’t clear whether Holly had changed or even learned anything because none of the survivors really talked about what happened at Hill House. They just moved on with their lives.
I think an important detail that Hand missed was that it was never proven that Hill House was really haunted. Anyone who had met their fate at the hands of Hill House was mentally unstable in some way. Hill House always knew who the most vulnerable person was. Nisa was too self-involved and full of herself to be an Eleanor Vance. But as the most annoying character in the novel, I was nevertheless glad the house took her!
It's a shame really, as I really wanted to like this novel. Now I'm going to have to find a way to sell or giveaway this lovely hardcover!
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