A HAUNTING ON THE HILL
RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 3, 2023
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From award-winning author Elizabeth Hand comes the first-ever novel authorized to return to the world of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House—a "scary and beautifully written" (Neil Gaiman) new story of isolation and longing perfect for our present time.
Open the door . . . .
Holly Sherwin has been a struggling playwright for years, but now, after receiving a grant to develop her play Witching Night, she may finally be close to her big break. All she needs is time and space to bring her vision to life. When she stumbles across Hill House on a weekend getaway upstate, she is immediately taken in by the mansion, nearly hidden outside a remote village. It’s enormous, old, and ever-so eerie—the perfect place to develop and rehearse her play.
Despite her own hesitations, Holly’s girlfriend, Nisa, agrees to join Holly in renting the house for a month, and soon a troupe of actors, each with ghosts of their own, arrive. Yet as they settle in, the house’s peculiarities are made known: strange creatures stalk the grounds, disturbing sounds echo throughout the halls, and time itself seems to shift. All too soon, Holly and her friends find themselves at odds not just with one another, but with the house itself. It seems something has been waiting in Hill House all these years, and it no longer intends to walk alone . . .
“Scary and beautifully written, imbued with the same sense of dread and inevitability as Jackson’s original, A Haunting on the Hill is quite extraordinary. It’s not pastiche, not ventriloquism. It puts me strongly in mind of a singer you love covering a song by another artist. It’s that song but now it’s being done by someone else. Remarkable.”
“A timeless, gothic ode that serves up the stuff of nightmares.”
“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.”
“If there’s a writer you can trust with this formidable task, it’s the wildly talented Elizabeth Hand. A Haunting on the Hill is an admirable successor to The Haunting of Hill House, alike in spirit but never trying to simply repeat what Shirley Jackson did in her classic novel. Creepy, tragic, and, yes, haunting. I tore through this novel, getting lost in the pages, drawn back into the mysteries of Hill House and enjoying every moment I was there.”
“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.”
“If there’s a spirit medium gifted enough to evoke the ghost of Shirley Jackson, it’s surely Elizabeth Hand, whose startling, original body of work I’ve long admired. A Haunting on the Hill is not a simple act of ventriloquism, but a true marriage of minds, and I believe Ms. Jackson would have been proud to be the inspiration for this smart and chilling return to the Hill House estate.”
“Eerily beautiful, strangely seductive, and genuinely upsetting: welcome back to Hill House. I recommend reading only in strong daylight, and never alone.”
“A Haunting on the Hill is absolutely captivating—a book that you’ll want to climb inside and love forever, until the moment you realize it’s too late to escape.”