AUDIO BOOK REVIEW: A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand

Publication Date: October 3, 2023 Format: audio  Genre:  Gothic Horror Narrator: Carol Monda

Publisher: Mulholland books Length:  10 hours 19 minutes Buy: Kindle | Audio

Synopsis

Open the door . . . . 
 
Holly Sherwin has been a struggling playwright for years, but now, after receiving a grant to develop her play Witching Night, 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 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 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 . . .

Review:

With permission this book takes us back to Hill House. I didn't read the Haunting of Hill House but I did watch the Netflix show and I can say it was much creepier than this book.  

While the house itself still maintained its spooky charm the characters were so flawed and all had dark pasts that just made you start rooting for the house to take them down. Most of the action centered around is there or isn't there anything strange going on. Petty arguments and grievances, jealousy and betrayal permeated the beginning of the book and it wasn't until close to the end when the true creepiness happened and even then it was a little too Disney's Haunted Mansion for me.  

I wanted to enjoy this since I was looking forward to the creep factor so close to Halloween however every time it was there it was lost in someone's pettiness or it jumped the shark. Sometimes showing instead of telling is all you need to be totally creeped out - instead I found myself waiting for the characters to be picked off. I did enjoy the added sound effects for the audio narration but ultimately it wasn't enough. 

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