We've seen scavengers feed on literary corpses before. The bones of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard have been picked clean. Writers have pillaged the work of Asimov, Burroughs, and many others. Sometimes it seems to be a cash grab. In other cases the writers and editors appear to genuinely honor the legacies of the deceased.
It can be done right. Chet Williamson's Psycho: Sanitarium, Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Percent Solution, Brian Aldiss' Frankenstein Unbound. There is a whole subgenre of shared universe fiction. At the bottom of the barrel you find fan fic. And the less said about that ghastly mashup trend from a number of years ago, the better.
I was highly skeptical when I heard of a sequel to The Haunting of Hill House. What next? Ghost Story? Is someone going to desecrate Boy's Life after Robert McCammon is gone?
My first choice to follow in the hallowed footsteps of Shirley Jackson would be Catriona Ward or maybe Jac Jemc. Barring the resurrection of Michael McDowell or T.M. Wright, Elizabeth Hand is as good a pick as any.
I can't, however, say I'm a Hand fan. She is certainly a good writer, but I always found her characters to be pseudo-hip, edgy, trendy-arty-hipster-types. That didn't stop me from putting a Hold in A Haunting on the Hill at my library.
Once again I was not particularly fond of her characters. They are your basic urban boho stereotypes. Fashionable anxiety, creatively pretentious, and it goes without saying that they are enamored of neo-pagan witchiness.
But were the character's in The Haunting of Hill House particularly likable? Needy, clingy Eleanor, catty vamp Theo, frathouse playboy Luke? Doctor Montague is all right, but his unctuous wife is unpleasant.
Happily, Elizabeth Hand cast away any doubts as she weaved her spell upon me. A Haunting on the Hill is a worthy sequel to Jackson's masterpiece.
The prose is slyly seductive. While there are no moments as memorably effective as the hand-holding scene in The Haunting of Hill House, A Haunting on the Hill is unrelentingly creepy. The novel is like a nightmarish and hallucinatory mushroom trip.
Hand follows Jackson's lead in keeping the supernatural aspects of her novel shrouded in ambiguity. We never knew whether the events of The Haunting of Hill House were the results of Eleanor's telekinetic ability or if the house is truly haunted. In Hand's story, a trio of local women who are possibly genuine witches may be responsible for the horrifying experiences in Hill House.
I loved A Haunting on the Hill, and it makes me reappraise my previous opinion on the work of Elizabeth Hand. She pulled off a exceedingly difficult trick with this book. It was a gamble and she could have easily fallen flat on her face with it.
There will never be another Lovecraft, another Bradbury, another King or Straub. No one can ever truly replicate the genius of Shirley Jackson, but Elizabeth Hand did as good a job as anyone could hope for.
Written by Mark Sieber
It can be done right. Chet Williamson's Psycho: Sanitarium, Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Percent Solution, Brian Aldiss' Frankenstein Unbound. There is a whole subgenre of shared universe fiction. At the bottom of the barrel you find fan fic. And the less said about that ghastly mashup trend from a number of years ago, the better.
I was highly skeptical when I heard of a sequel to The Haunting of Hill House. What next? Ghost Story? Is someone going to desecrate Boy's Life after Robert McCammon is gone?
My first choice to follow in the hallowed footsteps of Shirley Jackson would be Catriona Ward or maybe Jac Jemc. Barring the resurrection of Michael McDowell or T.M. Wright, Elizabeth Hand is as good a pick as any.
I can't, however, say I'm a Hand fan. She is certainly a good writer, but I always found her characters to be pseudo-hip, edgy, trendy-arty-hipster-types. That didn't stop me from putting a Hold in A Haunting on the Hill at my library.
Once again I was not particularly fond of her characters. They are your basic urban boho stereotypes. Fashionable anxiety, creatively pretentious, and it goes without saying that they are enamored of neo-pagan witchiness.
But were the character's in The Haunting of Hill House particularly likable? Needy, clingy Eleanor, catty vamp Theo, frathouse playboy Luke? Doctor Montague is all right, but his unctuous wife is unpleasant.
Happily, Elizabeth Hand cast away any doubts as she weaved her spell upon me. A Haunting on the Hill is a worthy sequel to Jackson's masterpiece.
The prose is slyly seductive. While there are no moments as memorably effective as the hand-holding scene in The Haunting of Hill House, A Haunting on the Hill is unrelentingly creepy. The novel is like a nightmarish and hallucinatory mushroom trip.
Hand follows Jackson's lead in keeping the supernatural aspects of her novel shrouded in ambiguity. We never knew whether the events of The Haunting of Hill House were the results of Eleanor's telekinetic ability or if the house is truly haunted. In Hand's story, a trio of local women who are possibly genuine witches may be responsible for the horrifying experiences in Hill House.
I loved A Haunting on the Hill, and it makes me reappraise my previous opinion on the work of Elizabeth Hand. She pulled off a exceedingly difficult trick with this book. It was a gamble and she could have easily fallen flat on her face with it.
There will never be another Lovecraft, another Bradbury, another King or Straub. No one can ever truly replicate the genius of Shirley Jackson, but Elizabeth Hand did as good a job as anyone could hope for.
Written by Mark Sieber
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