I've rarely read a book that left me as baffled as A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand... It claims to be "the first-ever authorized novel to return to the world of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House," which is a very strange way of saying "official sequel." Aside from the physical setting, which bears so little of the original's threatening atmosphere that it could have been any old house in any location at all, I genuinely fail to see the point of this novel. Since the author appears unable to choose the type of strange phenomenon that occurs at Hill House and crams every single kind of paranormal event ever reported (including lost time, disembodied voices, knocking and other sounds, unexplained lights, strange creatures, compulsive behaviours, shifting spaces, and things that appear and disappear) into her narrative, this dilutes the potential for fear, terror, or even simple discomfort. There's no subtlety whatsoever in her descriptions of what we, as the reader, know should be spooky. The crowning glory to this disaster is the addition of "real-life witches" (three of them! they wear big rings! and one of them has a witch ball in her garden!). I had a bad feeling very early on in this book when the author referred to old Ball jars as "crap." Alas, my intuition was correct.
In book-related news this week...
The copy of the nun memoir I won in a Goodreads giveaway weeks ago finally arrived.
Emma Newman, about whose writing I've enthused here before, announced that her next novel will be published this December. It's called The Vengeance and is the first in a series. Huzzah!