A review by arockinsamsara
A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand

5.0

What a great follow-up to Jackson's original. The atmosphere was perfect, and the story tight and compelling. The characters were all agreat combination of flawed and relatable, and while there was a primary characters, whose chapters were always narrated in the first-person, we moved across all four characters and the perspective shift was great. The chapters were all really short, which made the story even more compelling, pulling you deeper and deeper in, just as Hill House tricks you into being lost in its depths. There is depth added to the Hill House lore, but also more questions than anything else, which are all fitting the story and material.

This score is rounded up from 4.5 stars. I had a lot of fun with this story. What stops it from being five stars is that it felt like if it just scratched a little deeper there was more terror to excise, deeper depths to plumb. I don't know where or how, but, especially after some very harrowing set-pievces near the end, it just felt like I wanted to be a little more disoriented, a little more scared, and the story felt really close to that some times but stopped a little short. All in all, though, definitely a lot of fun, I am really glad to have picked it up.