Elizabeth Hand’s “A Haunting on the Hill” (Mulholland) is, the book jacket notes, “the first novel authorized to return to the world of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.” Authorized—by whom? Not by Jackson, who died in 1965, but by her heirs. “A Haunting on the Hill” is, therefore, a ghost story conjured by representatives of a deceased author’s estate. It all sounds a little uncanny.
Isn’t that the case, though, whenever we try to resurrect dead writers? In the past decade, a resurgence of acclaim has fully established Shirley Jackson as the queen of dark literary fiction, and there is no surer sign of an author’s success than the arrival of a new generation of writers eager to channel her spirit, rereading and reimagining her work. So much for the death of the author. These days, it seems, fan-fiction writers start posting their rewrites the moment a book leaves the printer—sometimes over the author’s vociferous objections.
Yet not a few literary classics, too, are constructed as revisions of previous ones, typically works in the public domain. Think of how Jean Rhys revised Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” in “Wide Sargasso Sea,” excavating a Caribbean backstory for that madwoman in the attic. Or how J. M. Coetzee broke apart “Robinson Crusoe” and rearranged the pieces to write “Foe.” Or how Peter Carey pillaged Charles Dickens to create “Jack Maggs,” with its title character based on the escaped convict who, in “Great Expectations,” turns out to be Pip’s secret benefactor.
Historically, though, such literary incursion into another writer’s territory has involved competition, rebellion, even hostility. The connection to the earlier work can be oblique and entirely tacit, and it’s notable that some of the greatest novels in the form have been written by authors bound to their predecessors in a post-colonial relation. In these cases, a defiance of authority is the literary catalyst. One can hardly imagine Chinua Achebe petitioning the heirs to the copyright to “Heart of Darkness” for permission to fill in the hazy areas on Joseph Conrad’s map.
By contrast, the more docile “authorized” novel has typically been reserved for juggernaut copyright-protected characters, like Ian Fleming’s James Bond or Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne—publishing ventures that have proved so profitable for so many people that it would be absurd to let the income stream be disrupted by a minor detail like a writer’s death. The result can be disconcerting. I remember, as a teen-ager, plucking a V. C. Andrews novel off the “New Books” shelf at the library, and realizing, a few chapters in, that something was . . . off. I later discovered, in what felt like a very V. C. Andrews twist, that Andrews had died years before, and the book I’d been reading had been written by someone else (a man!). If I’d squinted, I could have seen that the name “V. C. Andrews” on the cover bore a tiny superscripted ®, for registered trademark. In a way, we’d both been betrayed: I’d been tricked by a cleverly packaged counterfeit, while she’d been sold out by heirs who thought she could be replaced by someone else. To love someone, after all, is to believe that the person possesses some quality that makes her unique. That simulacrum Andrews novel left me feeling as if I were a kid bereft after the death of my puppy and my parents were blandly offering to buy a replacement.
These days, the more sophisticated literary estates may be less likely to hire ghostwriters to imitate a deceased writer’s work; instead, they authorize established writers to continue the work (and share cover credit) under their own names. The premise of a seamless transition, in which the original author slips off into the afterlife unnoticed, has been replaced by a Frankenstein-like chimera of the living and the dead. In this vein, we get Sophie Hannah writing for Agatha Christie, Sebastian Faulks writing for Ian Fleming, Brandon Sanderson chosen by the heir of Robert Jordan to continue the unfinished fantasy series “The Wheel of Time.” (On a loftier plane, Sandra Newman’s “Julia,” out this month, is an authorized “feminist retelling” of George Orwell’s “1984.”) Such collaborations tend to be respectful, reasonably successful, and positively reviewed, but there often is, nonetheless, something unnervingly lifeless about them. Like all the undead, the books’ resurrected protagonists are free to perform only a few limited actions, shadowy repetitions of actions they took in life—solving mysteries, spying on behalf of England, channelling the One Power. It’s hard to read them without imagining those unseen authorities peering over the writer’s shoulder and wondering about the limits of their good will.
The shiver that arises when creativity is touched by the cold finger of authority has nothing to do with the individuals involved. As a screenwriter working on an adaptation of a Shirley Jackson novel, I’ve had some contact with the folks from the Jackson estate, and (I swear) they’ve been great. But the creation of official sequels and spinoffs is inevitably haunted by questions of agency, power, and control. To join Elizabeth Hand on her journey to Hill House is to be reminded of the slippery dominance of genius, the way it both establishes and breaks its own rules, tempting then trapping those who dare to follow them. Faithfully adhering to the rules doesn’t guarantee success, yet breaking them will inevitably invite accusations of failure and betrayal. Each reader who arrives at “A Haunting on the Hill” hoping to return to the original Hill House will feel disappointed in her own way, although the shape of her disappointment will speak more to the nature of her loyalty to Jackson than to the qualities of the new book. Perhaps unsurprisingly, “A Haunting on the Hill” is least successful when Hand directly imitates Jackson, most successful when she draws on her own talents—and becomes truly fascinating when Hand lets those anxious whispers about authority and influence take over the tale.
The premise of Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” is that four strangers come together in order to conduct a paranormal investigation of Hill House, which has a reputation for being haunted. The premise of Hand’s “A Haunting on the Hill” is that four friends come together to rent Hill House in order to spend some time workshopping a play. The house is, unequivocally, the same one, as is clear from its name, its location (the town of Hillsdale), and its layout. That Hand can be so explicit about this is one of the privileges of full authorization—she doesn’t need to waste any time filing off the serial numbers. The chronology, too, is the same. There are passing references to the events of “The Haunting of Hill House”: “The woman whose husband built the place was killed when her carriage ran into a tree. That was in 1880. Then another woman was killed about sixty years ago when her car ran into the same tree. Same thing happened again with another woman in the eighties. They finally cut the tree down.” The middle woman is Eleanor Vance, the protagonist of “The Haunting of Hill House”; by dispensing with her so swiftly, Hand establishes that the house is the real star of the show. But there is a palpable discomfort there, too, in how those events are waved away, sandwiched between two other deaths and then dismissed with a joke. “That doesn’t sound haunted . . . sounds like bad driveway design,” remarks the narrator, a fortysomething playwright named Holly Sherwin, who’s hoping to revive her flatlined career with a spooky play titled “Witching Night.”
In Jackson’s novel, Hill House is associated with so many deaths and disturbing occurrences that the only reason to spend the night there is that you seek to encounter a ghost. By the time Holly and her friends show up, decades later, the body count has only risen, which is why it’s the perfect place to develop “Witching Night.” But then we run into that horror-movie dynamic wherein the people on the screen are oblivious of what’s screamingly apparent to the people in the audience. Over and over, the characters encounter unambiguous horrors, and somehow dismiss them. “Haunted?” one character says. “No one has ever seen a ghost here, if that’s what you mean.” Later, she says, “People project their own explanations onto it. Old houses can be noisy.” Meanwhile, the guests watch hares run out of the fireplace, and supernatural doorways materialize beside their beds. “Nothing here is obviously wrong,” they say, as the obvious wrongness continues to mount.
All this is approached with a sly comic sense, and yet the reader realizes that the situation is a compulsory feature of the author’s authorized project, the requisite premise for revisiting Hill House—and so a dead hand on her narrative imagination. The strange flatness of the characters in these moments arises from the fact that they’re operating in a world where the rules have been set by the departed. Characters can ask whether they should go to Hill House and why they should stay at Hill House and how Hill House works the way it does, but it’s an exercise in futility when they do. Those questions can’t be answered within the novel, because the answer lies outside it, in the requirements of an authorized effort to haunt “The Haunting of Hill House.” Only when the characters take a break from those imponderables can they be free to act within Hand’s imagination—and only then does the book come to life.
Hand has a gift for the sensuous, evocative detail, and her descriptions are often simultaneously seductive and spooky: small, wealthy upstate towns are populated by “people who distilled rare liqueurs from echinacea and comfrey, or made syrup out of white pine needles, or wove intricate rings and brooches from your own hair,” while a character with a flair for the gothic enjoys “psychotropic herbs, Victorian toy theaters, obscure Eastern European horror films, and social media accounts belonging to dead Hollywood starlets.” Hand deploys this descriptive talent to especially strong effect when she evokes Nisa, Holly Sherwin’s girlfriend. Nisa is an actress and a singer; she’s also crafty and duplicitous, eager not just to contribute to the workshopping of Holly’s play but to claw credit away from Holly whenever she can. All the participants in the workshop are prone to moments of sharp-elbowed competition and jealousy, but Nisa in particular is a self-centered nightmare, a crisply drawn near-parody of a theatre kid, given to bursting into song whenever she is not the center of attention. Hungry for success, she continually subjects Holly to the pitiless assessments of the untried young.
Nisa’s casual disregard for boundaries, and her slick contempt for anyone with the temerity to age or fail, make her a genuinely unsettling presence in the house. Shortly after the group arrives at Hill House, Nisa goes rummaging through the belongings of an older actress, appraising her wardrobe, sniffing her perfume, and putting on her lipstick. “Older women shouldn’t wear dark lipstick, anyway,” she thinks, smiling at herself in the mirror and closing the tube. Later, the actress returns to her room and discovers that, mysteriously, the top of the lipstick has been bitten off: “She could clearly see the imprints of tiny teeth—a rat? A mouse? Too small for a person for sure, and who would bite off a lipstick? A child, maybe, but there were no children here.” That rat-like nibbling perfectly encapsulates Nisa’s tiny, needling violations of those around her. The competition between older and younger women, and the high stakes of the battle for control of one’s artistic territory, is a recurring theme in the book. Every time it arises, the story takes on a pleasurable metafictional richness. Hand brilliantly captures the discomfort of someone’s being at once too close and too cruel to a vulnerable artistic project, the sense of violation that arises when someone moves too boldly into your creative space. One can almost hear Hand channelling Jackson’s ghostly whisper, as the young woman blithely appropriates what belongs to the older woman: What are you doing here? Get out.
The authorized novel is far from the only way we try to resurrect the literary dead; adaptations for film and television surely count, too. (Mea culpa.) “The Haunting of Hill House” has been haunted before; five years ago, Netflix aired a very free adaptation of the novel in ten episodes, and previous decades saw two feature-film versions. Still, the stakes are different when a novel inhabits the world of another novel, while aiming to be a wholly freestanding work. That the new novel is tethered to an already cherished one is part of the appeal, and part of the problem. The tether can be a tourniquet.
This theme takes center stage in the most frightening set piece in Hand’s novel, the answer to the mystery of why Holly’s playwriting career stalled. (All Hand’s characters, it must be said, are burdened with backstory—part of the contortions required to keep them at Hill House.) The story is brief, bizarre, and electric, and almost seems torn from a different book. Jackson’s particular skill was to suggest that, whatever she chose to depict, far darker horrors were lurking beyond the margins of the page. But Hand enjoys showing the monster, and this is the one section where she truly sets herself free.
As a promising young playwright, we learn, Holly once spent the night with a woman named Macy-Lee, who, drunk, told her a story about sleeping with a ghost: “A real good-looking one . . . real smooth skin, like a polished rock.” Nine months later, she gave birth to a ghost baby: “This slimy gray thing, cold as ice, but . . . pulsing. . . . all these tiny wriggly fingers were wrapped around a kind of face. Only it had no eyes or nose—it was just a jelly blob with a mouth, and this ropy string attached.” With evident relish, Hand recounts the gruesome details of Macy-Lee’s offspring, as it bites through its own umbilical cord, then slithers off into the woods. The scene itself is a kind of monstrous offspring; unlike the bulk of this mostly well-behaved book, it resembles nothing Jackson would ever have dreamed of writing.