A Review of Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill: A Novel

By Lisa Kröger

Lisa Kröger is a the author Monster, She Wrote and Toil and Trouble: A Women’s History of the Occult. She holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Mississippi. In addition to her writing, she is a co-host of the Know Fear Cast and Monster, She Wrote podcasts. In addition, she is Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Horror Writer’s Association, and a core member of the Nyx Horror Collective. With Nyx, she produced 13 Minutes of Horror, a short film festival for women filmmakers, which streamed on Shudder in 2021 and 2022. She also works with Stowe Story Labs, where she was a TV Writers Room Fellow in 2022 and part of the Feature Campus in 2023. With Stowe Story, she helps run the Nyx fellowship, a yearly scholarship for women writing in the horror genre. 

Holly, the protagonist of Elizabeth Hand’s newest novel A Haunting on the Hill (2023, Mulholland Books), is a playwright looking to spend some time away from the pressures of the world, a place where she can focus solely on her newest play “Witching Night,” a musical about a woman accused of witchcraft. The play itself is almost as compelling as the novel—it’s a feminist revision of history, complete with songs inspired by murder ballads. (There’s even a fun reference to ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore, for all the 1630’s English theatre enthusiasts out there.) Holly gathers her creative friends—a composer/sound designer, a famous stage actress, and Holly’s singer/songwriter girlfriend—and rents a beautiful mansion in the woods to finish her project. It’s the dream of every creative: a writing retreat paid for with grant money.

Here’s the only rub: that mansion. It’s Hill House.

Yes, that Hill House.

When Hand’s book hit shelves, readers were understandably perplexed. Is the house on the Hill really Hill House? (Yes.) Is Hill House the same one as Shirley Jackson? (Yes, the very same.) Can anyone write Shirley Jackson as well as Jackson herself? (Read on…)

The questions are understandable. Hill House is in and of itself a mammoth of supernatural literature. When considering haunted houses in literature (and television and film, for that matter), it is difficult to imagine a more terrifying than Shirley Jackson’s Hill House. It’s more than a house with a few ghosts or a violent past—it’s a house that was born evil, a living, breathing entity that shares more with a demon or a monster in a horror story than a dwelling made of stone and wood. Jackson famously described Hill House this way in her 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House:

Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it has stood for eighty years and might stand eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Hill House is an enigma—it is both the container of the haunting and simultaneously haunting itself. Nothing good will happen within its walls, and as promised in the original book, those walls will continue to stand for decades to come.

It’s no wonder, then, that many authors have been influenced by Hill House over the years. Some might even argue that Jackson’s book has become a kind of ur-text, and that all haunted houses that have come after have in some way been inspired by it. Stephen King, in Danse Macabre, said it was one of the greatest works of the supernatural in the past century, and he’s confessed that Hill House was a direct influence on the haunted hotel in The Shining (and later in his own Gothic haunted house miniseries Rose Red). Mark Z. Danielewski references Shirley Jackson in the footnotes of his postmodern classic of horror literature, House of Leaves. And of course, writer/director Mike Flanagan adapted Shirley Jackson’s novel to a limited series for Netflix in 2018.

Hand’s novel picks up where Jackson’s novel ends (A Haunting on the Hill is an authorized continuation of the Hill House drama), but it also folds in Jackson’s considerable legacy. Hand is an accomplished author of over 20 novels and collections, including Wylding Hall (2015, PS Publishing), another great Gothic horror novel set in a mysterious old house. She knows how to craft how an effective ghost story loaded with atmosphere.

Hand’s talent is on full display in A Haunting on the Hill, and that’s precisely what makes this adaptation work. In lesser hands, an adaptation purporting to be a continuation of the Hill House saga could feel like a cheap gimmick. But that is where Hand’s novel is most effective. She’s not trying to write a Shirley Jackson novel; A Haunting on the Hill is very clearly an Elizabeth Hand novel. The characters are compelling, the plot is tightly written, and the suspense and eerie atmosphere all work together to make this an entirely enjoyable novel.

The setting of Hill House works well too. Fans of Shirley Jackson will recognize the details that Hand so carefully wove into the story, as the characters explore places like the conservatory or the nursery (which proves to be just as creepy in Hand’s novel). There’s also other clever references to Shirley Jackson sprinkled throughout, like the mention of the summer people that come to visit the nearby town.

Hand’s book is a wonderfully written haunted house novel, one that fans of Shirley Jackson will appreciate. Hand proves that Hill House is just as terrifying in 2023 as it was in 1959.