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With sincere apologies, I feel like I need to get this question out of the way first, since the project of writing the first official sequel for a book as iconic as The Haunting of Hill House feels like it would be so daunting. How did you approach writing this book? I’m curious how closely you kept The Haunting of Hill House in mind while you wrote, or if you tried to create a certain distance between your project and Shirley Jackson’s.

It was a bit daunting, but to be honest, my actual writing process wasn’t much different from that with any other novel. I’d discussed my premise and characters with the Jackson Estate, and they read the chapters I’d written before we submitted them to my editor. I told them I wouldn’t be writing a pastiche or using any characters (other than Hill House itself) from Jackson’s masterpiece, but that I’d honor her work and engage with it in my own novel. As I’ve said elsewhere, I wrote an Elizabeth Hand novel set in Hill House. If I’d attempted to write anything else, I’d be asking to fail. So yes, I kept a certain distance between my own work and Jackson’s, though obviously A Haunting on the Hill is in a continuous dialogue with her novel. I wanted this to be a book that readers familiar with Hill House would enjoy, but also a standalone for those who hadn’t read Jackson’s book. Ideally, the latter would immediately do so!

Did your process for this book differ at all from your process on your other books? What does that process look like?

My process is basically sitting and writing 1,000 words a day, every day. Obviously I don’t always hit that mark, but after thirty-five years and twenty novels and myriad short stories and hundreds of book reviews, I usually come pretty close, and I don’t beat myself up if I miss it. So much of writing takes place inside one’s head — what my partner calls dreamwork. The actual putting it on the screen or page is only one step in the process (editing, revision, copyediting, agonizing are other steps in the process).

On a craft level, the language in A Haunting on the Hill is so melodious and beautifully haunting. I’m curious how intentional you were about tying the phonics of your language to the themes of the book?

Thank you! I love ghost stories and especially haunted house stories, and I’ve written a number of variations on these over the years. I’ve wanted to write ghost stories since I was about six years old, so I’ve read a huge number of them, and reread many of them over the lifetime, especially antiquarian ghost stories and visionary ghost stories — Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Arthur Machen, M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and especially Robert Aickman. I think that Aickman’s oblique approach to the supernatural especially seems somewhat like Jackson’s, the way they both start with the mundane and gradually rip away our expectations of what that word actually means — in their works, and sometimes in our own world, the mundane doesn’t really exist. Atmosphere is critical in crafting a believable shared world with the reader — there has to be enough common ground that the reader initially feels safe in the fictional world, before that veil of safety is torn away. The only way to do this on the page is with language, so precision in word choices and rhythm is really essential. If I’m reading a story, my own or someone else’s, and I come across an awkward word or phrase, it totally disrupts the “continuous dream of fiction” (as John Gardner famously put it). In a mimetic work, I think it’s easier to continue reading, but with a supernatural story, you’ve broken the spell — you’ve given the reader an instant to reflect and think, Oh, wait, THIS could never happen. And you lose them. It’s like coming across an anachronism in a historical novel or movie, like the extras in Spartacus who can clearly be seen wearing wristwatches.

Something I really connected to in A Haunting on the Hill was the idea of creative expression, the need to be creative, and the often-cannibalistic form that creativity can take. I’d love to hear more about your thoughts on this theme, and why you decided to lean so heavily in this direction on this particular project.

The origins and expressions of artistic creation are a recurring theme in my work. I felt like I needed a path into Hill House that would be my own, so having a bunch of artists stay there seemed like a natural way of doing that. Over the last few years, I’ve been fascinated by the whole notion of artistic appropriation, which is obviously something that’s baked into the creative process — none of us is inventing the wheel with our songs or stories or paintings. I think when possible it’s good to honor and acknowledge that — maybe not in a story or song itself (“I am singing this song/Which obviously owes a huge debt to Bob Dylan”) but in an Author’s Note or the like. I’ve written three novels that have historical figures in them, or characters obviously (to me) based on historical figures, and I always try to include info in the back of the book sharing my sources. With A Haunting on the Hill, Nisa is inspired by folk songs, in particular Child Ballads, but she’s also filtering it through her own personal background. Holly has used someone else’s experience as the basis for her first play, and now is drawing on a historical source for “Witching Night.” I liked playing with the notion that this makes her a somewhat unreliable person — all artists are thieves to some extent — and how it impacts her relationships to the others she’s working with at Hill House, especially with Nisa.

Speaking of characters: all of the characters in A Haunting on the Hill are so complicated and thorny (in the best of ways). How do you go about writing fully fleshed-out characters that aren’t necessarily likable, while balancing their characteristics with the needs of the story?

I love reading about complicated characters, and creating them as well. I think my starting point is that these characters (along with others I’ve written about) are likable, at least to themselves. No one sets out to be a villain or a fascist or an old-fashioned jerk: in their own minds, they’re the hero/ine, they’re the beleaguered one, they’re the victim. For this particular novel, it was especially important that each of the four central characters had their own ambitions and belief in their own talent (whether or not those are correct). They also needed to be increasingly suspicious and to some degree envious of the others as the story proceeds — that’s how the house preys on them. I think theater people might be particularly vulnerable in a situation like this — like other artists, they’re accustomed to having their work devalued in a world that’s often looking to exploit them, or ignore them. I’m also fairly adept at using my own flaws and weaknesses and experiences and grafting them onto my characters.

But truthfully, unlike in real life, often it’s just fun to be around fictional messed-up people. They’re very entertaining.

The meta-narrative of the play that Holly Sherwin is working on is so delightfully unnerving. How did you go about weaving this story-within-a-story through, and were there elements of the book that you unlocked by doing so? Did you look at any references while building out the play’s story?

I had a copy of “The Witch of Edmonton” and went through it multiple times, highlighting lines and scenes I could use. A lot of the material was pretty desultory (that’s why it’s not a well-known Jacobean play), but the scenes with Tomasin, the demonic black dog, were quite entertaining. I grafted some of that dialogue into Holly’s play, then added some Child ballads and other folk songs. I changed the lyrics for some of those, and altered some of the play dialogue as well. I chose songs and scenes that could easily serve the needs of Hill House once it got involved. Once I did that, it was relatively easy to shuttle back and forth between the rehearsals and the action of the story.

I loved the note in your acknowledgements, thanking your daughter for the conversations about who you should kill. Without giving anything away — how did those conversations go? Did you discover anything about the story while you were talking it through?

Callie had read an early, incomplete draft, and I told her what I had in store for the characters. She very adamantly told me I could not go through with some of my plans. I was on the fence, so I was running my ideas by her. I decided she was right — I was easily convinced! It was a pretty brief conversation, and once I made up my mind, I didn’t need to think about it any more, not that aspect of the story, anyway.

What authors have inspired you the most over the years?

Jackson, obviously. John Crowley, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Gene Wolfe, Evangeline Walton, Laurie Colwin, James Salter, John Fowles, Daphne Du Maurier. Those writers are part of my creative DNA — they helped shape me. More recently, I love Cara Hoffman, Victor LaValle, Robert Levy, Mariana Enriquez. But really, there are too many to mention. Whenever I answer a question like this, I always think of a half dozen more writers I forgot to name.

Beyond other authors and books, where do you find your inspiration?

Music, the visual arts, film — basically any other form of creative enterprise. I’ve lived in rural Maine for thirty-five years, and the landscape here never ceases to amaze me. I can say the same for London, where I’ve lived for a few months out of the year since the mid-1990s. Whenever I’m in London or some other city, I hit as many museums and plays as I can. I love ancient archaeological and ritual sites, so I always make it a point to visit those if I’m in a new place.

Many of your books exist in this uncanny, haunting, unnerving horror space. What draws you to this genre? Do you find writing these stories cathartic? Do they ever get under your skin and really unnerve you as you work on them?

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved ghost stories, monster movies, anything that unsettled me — but at a safe remove. My earliest stories as a child were either ghost stories or animal stories. As I got older, I just wrote more grownup versions of those. I’m not sure I’d call them cathartic, though I’ve exorcised a few demons over the years. But yes, sometimes they do get under my skin. This novel did — having Hill House inside my head for all that time really was an unsettling experience. It was exciting to write it but also it felt like living in a very dark space for all that time. So I’ll be ready to do something new. 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.