A Haunting on the Hill

From award-winning writer Elizabeth Hand comes the first novel authorized to return to the world of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House — a "scary and beautifully written" new story of isolation and longing perfect for our present time (Neil Gaiman).

Open the door...

Holly Sherwin has been a struggling playwright for years, but now, after receiving a grant to develop her play The Witch of Edmonton, 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 ornate, if crumbling, gothic 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 out 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...

"The lines of paranoia, art, and reality are terrifyingly blurred...only the brilliant Elizabeth Hand could so expertly honor Jackson's rage, wit, and vision with a twenty-first century twist." — Paul Tremblay

"A brilliant queer reimagining...Hand's work both modernizes and deepens Jackson's setting." — BookPage

"Honoring Jackson's story while owning this revival, Hand deploys masterful storytelling to merge the house's familiar covetousness with witches' tales, feminist themes of repression and unfulfilled promise, and character evolution that subtly matches the house's growing malevolence. Pitch perfect." — Booklist (Starred Review)

"A timeless, gothic ode that serves up the stuff of nightmares." — Kirkus Reviews

Elizabeth Hand is the author of Hokuloa Road, named a Notable Book of 2022 by the New York Times, and more than nineteen cross-genre novels and collections of short fiction. Her work has received the Shirley Jackson Award (three times), the World Fantasy Award (four times), the Nebula Award (twice), as well as the James M. Tiptree Jr. and Mythopoeic Society Awards, and she's written for publications including the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Boston Review, and more. She divides her time between Maine and London.