Reviews
"Hill House is back and haunting as ever in this vividly imagined return to Shirley Jackson's iconic setting. Elizabeth Hand weaves eerie beauty into the genuine terror lurking in her pages, crafting some of the most striking scares I've read in years. This book gave me the best kind of nightmares."-- Ana Reyes, New York Times bestselling author of The House in the Pines, "Elizabeth Hand's A Haunting on the Hill keeps the scares coming in a creepy, deserted mansion . . . A Haunting on the Hill also is adept at connecting the creepy noises and disappearing objects of Hill House to the psychology of the four characters, each of whom is hiding something....it's a measure of Hand's precision and skill that we have so much fun watching them put together the pieces that doom them."-- Minneapolis Star-Tribune, "The unsettling atmosphere in this novel builds from the start and never disappoints. Hand deftly layers the history of the house with the past of each character and the things that haunt them. . . . A Haunting on the Hill is a love letter to Hill House and a very impressive tribute to Shirley Jackson. It is also a tremendous addition to Hand's already outstanding, multi-genre oeuvre."-- Gabino Iglesias, NPR, "A brilliant queer reimagining...Hand's work both modernizes and deepens Jackson's setting."-- BookPage, "The lines of paranoia, art, and reality are terrifyingly blurred for our group of hungry and damaged actors cloistered within the moldering walls of Hill House. Only the brilliant Elizabeth Hand could so expertly honor Jackson's rage, wit, and vision with a twenty-first century twist. The old place is as creepy, disorienting, and menacing as ever."-- Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World, "Pours on the page-turning thrills with elegant glee, delivering everything from slight chills to all-out madness, but this is not simply a haunted attraction full of jump scares and predictable weirdness. No, Hand has also preserved and adopted another key element of Jackson's fiction: The unanswerable questions always lurking in the margins. With seemingly every page she introduces yet another moment of weird fiction brilliance that might be explained later, or might simply lurk in your consciousness forever, waiting like a trap about to spring. It's, like the narrative itself, a remarkable balance to strike. And in that balance between reverence and invention, legacy and originality, Hand has done something powerful. A Haunting on the Hill is an instant haunted house classic, a stirring tribute to a horror legend, and a book that, like Hill House itself, will swallow you up with its dark spell. Don't miss it." -- Paste Magazine, "Hand is responding to the source material on a deeper level, echoing Jackson's structure, characterization and storytelling beats rather than relying on superficial similarities.... above all, it's scary. Hand's facility with language and atmosphere and use of short, propulsive chapters work their own dark magic on the reader. It's a compelling and frightening novel, but did it need to take place in Jackson's universe? Probably not -- and that's why it works...In a landscape of soulless franchises geared toward quick, shallow hits of fan service, she has the maturity and talent to deliver the follow-up that Jackson's novel deserves (even if it didn't necessarily need one)... Like Jackson, Hand offers no explanation for Hill House's malevolence, preserving the original novel's power and mystery."-- New York Times Book Review, "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. . . . Strange and wonderful, a frightening foray into the supernatural that will inspire you to go back and reread the original."-- The Washington Post
