On November 15, 2023, Word for Word, Southern New Hampshire University’s (SNHU) online literary series, welcomed guest author Elizabeth Hand to read from her latest novel, “A Haunting on the Hill.”
Hand is the author of 20 multiple-award-winning novels, five collections of short fiction and essays and numerous media tie-in books. A longtime reviewer for the Washington Post and Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, her criticism and essays have also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Salon, Village Voice and numerous other publications.
Her fiction includes the Cass Neary series, the supernatural thriller “Hokuloa Road,” “Curious Toys” (featuring visionary artist Henry Darger) and “Wylding Hall.” Her latest, “A Haunting on the Hill,” is a follow-up to Shirley Jackson’s classic “The Haunting of Hill House” and is the first book to be authorized by Jackson’s estate.
Hand teaches creative writing at the Stonecoast MFA program and has recently led workshops in Lahore, Pakistan and Oxford UK, among many other places. “Generation Loss” and its sequels are in development for a UK TV series, and her novel “Wylding Hall” is under option, also in the UK. She divides her time between the coast of Maine and North London.
After reading an excerpt from “A Haunting on the Hill,” Hand answered questions from event moderators and attendees. The following is an edited transcript of that Q&A.
W4W: Can you talk a little bit about the connection of the theater to your writing?
EH: Well, I’m a failed playwright, and a failed actor, and a failed director. I became stagestruck at an early age. I really wanted to go into theater, so I joined a BFA program, but I left after three years. I realized that it was much harder to be a playwright than I had thought it would be and probably harder than any other kind of writing. But it’s always kind of stuck with me that it was something I really wanted to do and I couldn’t do.
For this story, Holly is somebody who had a career as a playwright that was successful and then it got derailed. She’s always wanted to reclaim her career and she receives an arts grant that gives her that opportunity.
Even though I did not pursue a career as a playwright, I have friends who are performers or actors, and I’ve always been really drawn to that aspect of the arts. I love reading biographies of actors and theater people and performers.
It’s also something that’s just fun to write about. Several of my books cover the topic, from “Winterlong,” my first novel, which has a troupe of Shakespearean actors traveling across this post-apocalyptic landscape, and my novel “Illyria,” which deals with a group of high school students putting on a production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”
I love playing with theater on the page. When you wind up actors and put them in a room together, sparks fly. If you’re lucky, the sparks ignite a fire, and you get to see something wonderful happen on stage. In a book or a drama or fiction, unlike real life, you can really play without having hurt feelings and people storming off the stage with the entire enterprise crashing down.
Including theater in my writing doesn’t quite make up for never having been able to do it in real life, but that’s about as close as I’m going to get.
W4W: You’re the first person who has received the permission and support of the Shirley Jackson Estate to write a sort of sequel to “The Haunting of Hill House.” How did that come about?
EH: The Estate approached me about eight or nine years ago and asked if I’d be interested. I thought it sounded great. I wrote up some sample chapters and they liked it, but then they had a movie or the TV series come along so they backburnered the project.
During the pandemic, the agent for the estate got back in touch with me and asked if I was interested in the project again. I said that’d be great, so he and I and Lawrence—who is Shirley Jackson’s oldest son and the executor for the estate—had a number of Zoom meetings to try to think of how we could revisit Hill House. I came up with the idea of putting on a show. They liked the idea, so we went to my publisher and they were on board. It was my pandemic project.
W4W: It feels like you’re like the perfect person to write this, as you are so steeped in ghost stories and the literature of haunted houses. You know Shirley Jackson’s work backward and forward. They made a wise choice in reaching out to you, and the book really testifies to that.
EH: It was fun. There was a certain amount of anxiety at first, but I felt like I pulled it off. Sometimes I finish a project and I think, Eh, didn’t quite do it but that’s the best I could do. But with this one, I felt like I hit my mark. Lawrence said that he loved it. He thought it was terrifying and the ending was great. He felt that I had done well by his mother’s work, which made it feel like a success.
W4W: You do very well paying homage to Jackson’s work, but throughout the novel you also have references to murder ballads, ancient Greek tragedies, toy theaters, “Sister Europe” by The Psychedelic Furs and Nirvana’s “Unplugged” album. How much research went into these forms of entertainment you interspersed into the novel, and what made you choose them for this story?
EH: These are all things that I love, so I just threw them into the mix. Whenever I’m writing something, I find my own way into it. I must find something that I’m going to feel very strongly about—something that I really love, or something that I’m really interested in but I don’t know a lot about so I can explore it.
Because this book was basically playing in somebody else’s sandbox, I needed to really honor Shirley Jackson’s vision and her legacy. There wasn’t anything I could do with Hill House itself, but I had more leeway with the characters. I needed something that felt very much my own, that I could follow. Music turned out to be that thing. I’m fascinated by murder ballads and folk songs, and a lot of my books deal with music in one form or another. It’s one of those things I return to a lot.
For this book, I was at my partner’s house, where I stay when I live in London, and he had a copy of a collection of child ballads and old ballads in the house, and I picked it up and started reading it. I was familiar with a lot of them just by listening to classic folk music for 40, 50 years. But I started reading the book and thought the ballads would be perfect for the play that they’re doing. “The Witch of Edmonton” was a real Jacobean play written by Thomas Dekker, and it is the basis for Holly’s play in my book. Many of the folk ballads I found would have been contemporaneous with that. We don’t have any record of ballads being written about Elizabeth Sawyer, a woman tried and convicted as a witch during the reign of James I, but it’s very possible that they did exist. She was a very well-known figure. There were broadsides written about her, and it was decades after her death that Dekker had written about her.
Making use of these murder ballads felt like it was one of those things that sort of dropped from the sky into my lap. Some of them I used verbatim. For others I changed the lyrics to come up with something different so that it would be more fitting with the tone of “A Haunting on the Hill” and “The Haunting of Hill House.”
W4W: There are additional contemporary references in the book—cost of living, smartphones, high-tech sound-recording devices…how did you go about folding these topics and devices into the narrative without disrupting its Gothic tone?
EH: Whenever I approach a supernatural story like this one, it’s really important for me to make it feel as if it could really happen now. I’m not a big believer in the supernatural, but if there was this paranormal element to our world, I think it is going to be unimpacted by whether we have cell phones or we’re all sitting in front of a fire outside a cave somewhere thousands of years ago.
Having these modern trappings adds to the verisimilitude and feeling that maybe this could actually happen. Obviously it couldn’t—readers have to employ a suspension of disbelief—but there are very real themes here too.
During the pandemic, we were all trapped inside our homes and not able to escape our own heads, our own families, our loved ones, or else being very, very isolated and on our own, and one of the things Holly and Nisa talk about is escaping from the city for a few days.
I think it’s telling that there were a number of haunted house books that came out this autumn. It’s the aftermath of the pandemic. People write horror or supernatural stories because they’re working something out as a culture in the zeitgeist. Haunted houses turned out to be an effective way to channel what we went through in the pandemic.
W4W: There are a lot of haunting visuals in this book. What techniques do you use to elicit that fear in your readers? Can you talk a little bit about language and the element of shock and surprise that comes with this type of writing, or any type of creative writing for that matter?
EH: Some of it ties into what I was saying about trying to make the reader feel that the world they’re inhabiting on the page or on the screen is analogous to the world that we inhabit. I try to describe things very carefully and very realistically.
This book opens with Holly and Nisa driving through what I imagine as the Hudson Valley, and Holly is looking out the window and seeing the results of gentrification, but she’s also seeing the ravages of people being unemployed or underemployed and this beautiful landscape that’s been desecrated over the years by poverty. I’m not belaboring that, but that’s what she sees. I’m setting it as a real place, where anything can happen.
As for language, I try to write very precisely. And I’m sure there isn’t a writer out there, however much of a hack they may be, who’s going to say, I don’t try to write precisely, I write sloppily. But some of us more than others may get hung up on precision. I spend a lot of time really thinking about one word, one phrase, one sentence so that the reader can really see it and feel it and experience it the way I am.
For the moments of shock or terror, that is my mode of writing—to create growing dread or unease. It’s what I like to read. Robert Aickman is one of my favorite writers, who creates an unparalleled sense of unease. I tend to want to create that mood, or tone, or atmosphere. But people reading this kind of story, myself included, read it because they want to be scared. At some point you want to have that gotcha moment, that jump scare. I try to carefully choose the moments when something scary will happen. But writers write in different ways. Stephen King obviously writes very differently than I do. Shirley Jackson writes very differently than I do. But that’s what I like to do—have a slow burn, then have the scary thing come out and grab you by the throat.
W4W: There are many short chapters in this novel. Can you talk a little bit about how writing short chapters impacts pace?
EH: I didn’t used to write books with short chapters. In fact, some books were only one very, very long chapter. But I noticed over the last 10 years or so, probably because of our decreasing attention spans, that more and more novels were being written with very short chapters, like soundbites. I thought they were effective in making you want to keep going. So I stole from that. And there were times where I had longer chapters, but I would find a place to cut it off and truncate it. I trained myself to either write those sentences right off the bat or to write longer paragraphs then go back through the chapter and find where those breaks were. It’s a very effective way of hooking a reader and keeping them reading.
I think the most effective narrative mode for supernatural fiction is the novella. Some of the greatest supernatural stories that have ever been written are novellas. “The Turn of the Screw.” Even “The Haunting of Hill House” is short. Oliver Onions’s “The Beckoning Fair One.” If you think about it, “Heart of Darkness” is a short horror novel. Every time the reader closes a book, that dread, and unease, and fear—perpetuated by a suspension of disbelief—goes away. Whatever tension you are building leaches away, and the next time the reader opens that book again, they have to build it back up. But with the novella, it’s almost like you’re telling a ghost story, which is something that is done in one sitting. That’s one of the things that the short chapters do, conversely—they keep you hooked, wanting to read to the end.
W4W: Maybe the short chapters also make it easier to pick up that sense of dread again. The reader could put it aside, pick it up the next evening, and the short chapters throw you back into the momentum that you had set aside the previous night.
EH: Yeah, that makes sense.
W4W: The book opens in the first-person point of view and from Holly as our narrator. About 20 chapters in, the point of view changes to third person and follows Nisa. From that point on, the chapters vary between Holly’s first-person perspective and Amanda’s, Stevie’s and Nisa’s third-person perspectives. Can you talk about how that came to be and what you were up to structuring the book that way?
EH: I love to write in the first person, and a lot of my books and stories are first-person narratives. I think it’s too easy of a trap to fall into first-person narratives all the time. But for this story, I strongly felt that I wanted to have Holly’s voice there at the outset. It can be difficult to pull off a horror novel or a supernatural novel in the first-person because you’re not getting that big wide view. You’re not able to see the huge shadowy looming figure from behind until it’s too late.
That was one of the reasons I shifted to having the different points of view. I wanted it to be this sort of “Rashomon”-like narrative where each one of the characters is having their own experience of Hill House and their own experience of the rehearsal. So there’s a lot of paranoia, and mistrust, and suspicion, and a lot of ego skirmishes going on. Some of that is the house acting on them. And to be able to show that, I felt like I needed to follow each one of them around for a while. But I also wanted to be able to return to Holly’s first-person perspective because she’s the barometer for whatever is happening. She’s in some ways steady throughout much of the story while the other characters seem to be more buffeted by the vibes that they’re picking up from Hill House.
W4W: Many people think negatively about head-hopping. Can you distinguish for our guests the difference between what you’re doing in this novel with multiple points of view and head-hopping?
EH: To me, head-hopping is when you’re randomly shifting points of view without thinking about the impact it’s going to have on a reader. Cinematically, if you’re watching a movie that’s constantly shifting from one point of view to another, it can be very confusing. You’re not going to be able to really develop an emotional attachment to any character because you may not know whose point of view it is.
Some films are obviously made to confuse the viewer, and I think some stories are written that way too, where you want to have a lot of shifting perspectives, because you want the reader to question whose story it is. But I wouldn’t ever say that head-hopping should never be done. The main thing you don’t ever want to do is bore your reader, because if you do that, all is lost. So if you can do something like head-hopping effectively, and there’s a reason for doing it, then I would say go for it. But if you’re not sure why you’re doing it, and it’s something that’s going to leave the reader confused for no good reason, you should rethink why you’re making that choice.
Writing is all technique. Why am I punctuating this sentence this way? Why am I choosing a period full stop here rather than a colon or a semicolon or a comma? Where do I break this sentence? Whose point of view do I want to show here? Why? Do I want to have an omniscient view here? Am I looking for the wide angle? Do I want to have something very tight and focused? I think about those things all the time. One learns to question these choices by writing a lot, reading a lot, and thinking a lot about it.
W4W: How much do you outline your books beforehand? And how much do you think beforehand about what point-of-view structure you’re going to be using? Do you come to those decisions prior to the writing or are they generated by the act of writing itself?
EH: They’re generated by the act of writing itself. I’m a very intuitive writer, which is not necessarily the most efficient way to write, but I don’t know what I’m doing until I’m doing it. I will sometimes force myself to do an outline, or my editor will push me to do it. I might have an idea in mind, or a character, or a setting. I usually begin with setting.
With the case of Hill House, the setting was there, so I had something to work with from the get-go, but for the rest I just find my way through it. It can take me a very long time, because if I’m writing something from beginning to end, I might have to go back to the beginning to have it match with the end. Sometimes I have to rewrite it all over again.
W4W: How many drafts would a typical novel of yours go through?
EH: Maybe three drafts of my own, and then my editor makes me write 39 additional drafts.
W4W: What advice would you give to yourself if you could go back and talk to the younger Elizabeth Hand just starting out on her writing journey? What would you say to her that you might also want to share with writers in the audience who are at the beginning of their journeys?
EH: I would probably say learn to outline. If you know how to outline, you’ll save yourself a lot of angst. But by the same token, I think for me a lot of the pleasure of writing comes in not knowing what I’m doing. So I would say outlining is a very useful skill to develop if your brain works that way. And if it doesn’t, one of the most crucial things is to write every day. If you can’t do that, at least think deeply about it every day or read something every day. Be mindful of what you’re writing every day.
I feel like whatever decisions I’ve made, even if they were bad ones, turned out OK for me in the end. I may have been a bad playwright, but I’m able to make use of it now. So something to think about is how all the things that seem to be failures may be of good use later on. A lot of the things I failed at, I have been able to make use of in my writing much, much later. They turned out to be fortunate failures. I don’t know if that’s advice that anybody can follow, but it worked for me.
W4W: What’s next for Elizabeth Hand?
EH: I’m working on a novel that’s a mashup of gothic and noir, loosely inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca.” It’s a queer reimagining of the two central characters, Rebecca and Mrs. Danvers, being in love and having this relationship in 1920s London before going on a killing spree. It’s not affiliated with the du Maurier estate, so it’s not a prequel or sequel—it’s just inspired by it. If you’ve read the book or seen the movie, you know that Rebecca and Mrs. Danvers had a thing. I mean, it’s so obvious. Everybody knows that, so I’m just taking that and running with it and murder.
W4W: We look forward to seeing how that project unfolds, and thank you for sharing your latest work with us today, Liz.
EH: You’re very welcome. Thank you for having me. It was a lot of fun.
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