A HAUNTING ON THE HILL, by Elizabeth Hand
As Holly, the protagonist of Elizabeth Hand’s “A Haunting on the Hill,” approaches an imposing, deserted mansion tucked off a remote country road, she drives past a tree stump that’s “choked with poison ivy, a riot of scarlet leaves and white berries.” Though she doesn’t know it yet, the tree that once stood there claimed the life of Eleanor Vance, the tragic lead from the novel’s antecedent text, Shirley Jackson’s wildly influential “The Haunting of Hill House.” And so, a couple dozen pages into the book, Hand makes her first decisive mark on Jackson’s landscape, acknowledging her predecessor while making the house her own. When Jackson left Hill House, the tree was still standing. Hand is here to chop it down.
Holly finds herself so taken with the property that she decides to rent it for a few weeks, planning to use the space to rehearse her new play, “Witching Night,” a feminist reimagining of a 17th-century text about a woman who made a pact with the Devil. She’s joined by her girlfriend Nisa, a gifted singer-songwriter adapting English murder ballads for the production, and her friend Stevie, who’ll pull double duty as both Satan and sound designer. Rounding out the cast is Amanda, an aging actress who’s barely worked since her murky involvement in a fatal onstage accident years before. All four are unmoored, seeking purpose through art, and vulnerable to the machinations of an evil house with motives of its own.
Like the poison ivy that curls around the tree stump, the house winds its tendrils around the new occupants. All was not well among the foursome even before their arrival at Hill House — secret affairs, conflicts over artistic ownership — and the strife ramps up once they take residence. Amanda, vain and paranoid, becomes convinced that the voices she hears in the night are her younger collaborators gossiping about her; Nisa fears her contributions to the play are being erased; and Stevie becomes enchanted by (and afraid of) a tiny, inexplicable door in the wall of his room.
Hand, the author of 14 novels, including “Hokuloa Road,” has long been preoccupied with the notion of artistic creation as a form of folk magic or conjuring, one that exacts its toll on body, mind or spirit. “A Haunting on the Hill” is shot through with that witchy sacrifice. In early rehearsals, the troupe feeds on the house’s spooky vibes, producing electrifying, transcendent work. But nothing gold can stay, not in this house, and the characters are soon beset by increasingly terrifying events: strange slippages of time, photos and recordings that turn out distorted, odd noises and apparitions, and huge, uncanny black hares that haunt the property. Even warnings from the housekeeper and an ominous neighbor aren’t enough to roust them from the house, though: The drive to recapture that magic of creation holds them captive.
