This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
A Haunting on the Hill is now available from Mulholland Books.
Olivia Rutigliano: I’m so excited because this is the first continuation of The Haunting of Hill House that has been sanctioned by the Shirley Jackson estate. I’m so interested in how you came to this project and how the project developed and what it was like writing with Shirley Jackson as the figure on your shoulder.
Elizabeth Hand: Well, some years back, I was actually in conversation with the Shirley Jackson estate through her agent, Mary Weiss. And at that time, we were talking about doing a follow-on to The Haunting of Hill House. And I think they were talking to myself and to other writers, and for whatever reasons, the project just got back burnered. Everything was perfectly amicable. But during the pandemic, I think in 2020, Mary got back in touch with me. And we kind of revisited the idea and I said, ‘What do you think? You know, do it now.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, let’s talk to Laurence,’ who’s Shirley Jackson’s son and executor. And it was a completely different idea from what I’d had before, which was really not a very formed idea at all.
So, we had several Zoom conversations in which we tossed around different ideas, and then ultimately we came up with what the book is about, which is a small group of actors, theater people who move into Hill House for what they think is going to be an extended time to work on rehearsals for a play and development. And hijinks ensue!
I am very grateful to the Jackson family for trusting me with this. And Laurence said he loved the book, which was really ultimately all I cared about. I mean, obviously I cared about other things, too. But really, if he did not like the book, I would have said, ‘we can’t do this.’ I heard from a friend of mine who had been in touch with two of the other siblings, that they had read it and were happy with it as well. So I thought, okay, if they’re alright with it, then I’m okay with it.
They were wonderful to work with. There was really no oversight. I think with one minor change that Laurence asked for in the copy editing stage. It was just a wonderful working partnership, you know? And I felt very, you know, very respectful of the fact that they were trusting me with this incredible legacy and opportunity. And so I really, you know, really didn’t want to screw it up!
OR: I became so excited when it seemed that there was going to be not only elements of the classic Jacksonian Gothic, but also a wonderful meta story about a theater troupe and a playwright and the relationship between real life events and capturing them in a fictional way! And I thought this was a really nice foil to some of the programing we’re getting about true crime podcasting, and the way certain creative figures, as in Only Murders in the Building, for example, step into murders or tragedies and experience those events inspiring an original work. I was specifically reminded by the novel Devil House by John Darnielle, which is about a true crime writer who moves into a house where some grisly murders have taken place, and grapples with the ethics of the situation.
EH: He’s the guy from Mountain Goats, right?
OR: Yeah, he’s so cool.
EH: That’s on my TBR list!
OR: It’s so good! I think these two books would be in conversation with another! I’m very interested in how you respond to this fad, but also take it in a new direction. I mean, I haven’t read anything about theater troupes and plays and playwrights and people from that community weighing in on crime or horror events in their reality. I was wondering what led you to that element?
EH: Well, I’m a failed playwright. I always wanted to write, but I became sort of besotted with the theater when I was, I don’t know, a young adolescent. I grew up in a town where there were a lot of theater people. So I was always sort of aware that in addition to it being this magical thing, that it was also something that people did for a living. And, you know, you would see them in the grocery store or whatever, and then they would go off on Broadway or TV. I started writing plays in high school for a small local children’s theater troupe, and they were produced, and I went to university in a BFA program. I was their first playwriting candidate. And I just totally flamed out for lots of reasons—among them, the fact that I was spending all my time kind of engaging with the punk scene in New York and D.C. instead of going to class. But I also, after three years in this really intensive program, I realized I was never going to be a good playwright, that writing a good play is really hard. That’s why there are many fewer great plays than there are, I think, great novels and short stories. So, I just kind of left that behind. But I’ve always maintained this love for theater and have friends who are performers or actors, and so it’s something I’ve returned to a lot in my fiction. And for this I thought, ‘Oh, I could kind of do this again in sort of a sideways way.’ And I don’t think it’s any spoiler to say that at the outset that Holly is also kind of a stymied playwright. She had this initial success and then things just didn’t go the way that she wanted them to go. I felt like that was a character I could really engage with and write with and identify with.
OR: I’m sensing a little bit of Cass Neary in here, too.
EH: That’s absolutely true. I was actually thinking of that as well—somebody else who didn’t cash in on their early promise. I think Holly is a lot less of a train wreck than Cass. And she’s also coming of age in a different time. You know, the book is set now, it’s post-pandemic. And I think Cass would have a much harder time if she was coming of age or had come of age more recently than the 1970s.
OR: If Cass also showed up at Hill House, it would be a completely different book!
EH: That I’ve actually given thought to over the years! In some of my earlier works, I would have crossover from characters who would sort of recur. And I thought like, ‘Oh, what about Cass having a little cameo in here?’ And then I thought, No, that would just be a bit too much… have her crawling in the windows of Hill House.
OR: An interesting thought experiment!
EH: Right.
OR: Curious Toys is one of my favorite books of all time. But I’m so excited by this new one because it brings you back to a Gothic tone and allows you to play with slightly creepy atmospheric elements. What was it like doing that with the Shirley Jackson template? What was it like engaging with that novel as opposed to creating your own world from, say, a Chicago World’s Fair-style environment?
EH: Yeah, that’s a great question. And thank you! I’m glad that you like Curious Toys. I mean, it’s got the haunted ride in it… that’s sort of a haunted house? I just love haunted houses! I love big spooky houses. They turn up a lot in my fiction. My grandparents had a not at all spooky, but huge old house overlooking the Hudson in New York, and we kind of spent a lot of time there growing up, and it really imprinted on me.
So the idea of having these kinds of vast spaces to wander through, especially when you’re a child, they’re just so mysterious and so full of potential. You don’t know what’s behind this door and you’re always finding another door in the stairway. I think that’s why we get into haunted house novels and films. I think we just have an affinity for them, for, you know, these big places and, you know, to, to a different extent, warehouses or subways or manmade spaces that kind of open up a portal to something else.
I just love haunted house stories. And The Haunting of Hill House is kind of the haunted house story, certainly for Americans. For me, it was just a matter of really following the template that [Jackson] created. Laurence sent me scans of the drawings that she had made, like the house plans for Hill House, some of which I think are reprinted in the Franklin bio. But I had them in like a bigger format. And so that was really cool—to see how she envisioned that space. And I had read the book multiple times over the years, and I reread it more than once when preparing to write this book. And during one of those three readings, I just went through with a highlighter to highlight all the references to doors and windows of the halls and just… spaces within it, because I thought, if I get anything wrong, people are going to call me on it! If I have the red room at the wrong end of the hallway, you know, no one’s going to let me get away with it!
So, I tried really hard to adhere to the design that she had set for her house. So having it all there, it’s kind of like having an existing stage set. And it had in my novel, there is sort of a history to Hill House that takes place 60 years after the events of Shirley Jackson’s novel. So, a lot of time has passed. And I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say there have been other occupants of Hill House during those 60 years. It has history to it, but it still maintains the good bones that Shirley Jackson used—the scaffolding and the structure that she created when she wrote it. For me, it was mostly a matter of going in there with my own characters and letting them loose.
The only character who’s at all a follow-on from her novel is the house itself. I treated that as a character, so I tried to capture the tone—the foreboding and the melodrama that she had, in her novel, attached to the house. I tried to bring that to my version of it. It’s hers, but it’s filtered through my words. To to take a theatrical metaphor, it’s like taking a script, but reinterpreting it with new characters and costumes and time shift.
OR: Do you have a top five ranking of haunted houses and/or buildings in books or movies? I’m just curious if there’s a reading or watching list that might naturally accompany the book.
EH: Wow. That’s a great question. Questions like that, I always like, freeze up at.
OR: Oh no, I’m sorry!
EH: No, no, that’s okay. There’s so many. It might be hard for me to pick a specific story, but certainly… stories by M.R. James, the great antiquarian ghost story writer. He often has houses like that. In Sheridan LeFanu’s story “Green Tea,” I think the character might even be a deacon or a vicar or something, and it’s not necessarily in a haunted house, but in his house, he’s haunted by this spectral monkey. I mean, it’s kind of funny, but it’s also creepy. He was just a master of atmosphere and tone and mood. What else? Dan Chaon’s Ill Will is one of my all-time favorite scary books. I’ve never been able to bring myself to go back and reread that book because it scared me. It’s truly the novel that scared me the most in my adult life. And it’s not you know, it’s not exactly a haunted house, but it is a bad place, a bad space that one of the characters finds himself in. And to me, he just did this incredible job of creating a quintessential bad place. I think, you know, that’s what haunted houses are! I’m looking around at my library to find something.
OR: I’ve just written that book down. I’ve heard of it before but I’ve never read it! And I don’t know if I’m brave enough.
EH: It’s a great novel. I love him. I just finished reading his most recent book and I think he’s a genius. He is just amazing. I love haunted house stories. Oh, you know—and the movie The Haunting, the Robert Wise movie from the early 60s. Great, great movie. Great scary movie.
OR: The big question is: how do you decide what narrative voice to write in? I mean, this is a novel with a very strong first-person narration, which I think grounds it in the Gothic tradition, that Jane Eyre-style. With your book’s narration, you can really feel things happening around Holly. What made you choose to write in that perspective?
EH: That’s always a really hard decision. And sometimes I’ll write an entire story or novel in the wrong voice. I’ll realize it wants to be a first-person and not a third-person. For A Haunting on the Hill, it alternates between the main voice of Holly’s first-person narrative, and other very close third-person points of view (from the other characters like Nisa and Stevie and Amanda).
And I did that because it would have been difficult to actually tell the story and get the full effect of Hill House if there was only one person’s point of view. You know, in the original book it’s mostly Eleanor, but you do get to see the other characters. I don’t think it’s a really close third, but you get to see more of their experience.
And I actually did have, for some of the chapters, a first-person point of view for Nisa, and my editor said, ‘no, I don’t think that works, I think it’s too confusing.’ So, I changed that, I think it was the right decision. But as I was writing it, I was trying with different things. It’s the same thing with crime novels, you know, with the Castle Neary novels. It’s difficult when you’re telling that kind of a story because you only have the perspective of the one person. It works for, you know, sort of amateur sleuth stories like the Cass books, but it can make it difficult because you’re not getting the benefits of other points of view: the police point of view or the murderer’s point of view or, you know, the victim. All of these different things, you’re losing that. So I just kind of wanted to open it up a bit. And so it shifts back and forth. But, yes, Holly is the central character. Her voice came to me pretty early on. And I love working in first-person. I do it a lot. I actually have to make an effort not to use it all the time because I enjoy writing it so much. But there are certain stories that it just doesn’t work for.
OR: That makes sense. Speaking of voices and cultivating atmosphere, this might be a good time for me to selfishly jump toward Curious Toys. And the characters in that novel are wonderful, but my favorite character is Henry. I was so excited when I discovered it. A colleague had emailed me to say, ‘Olivia, I have a book that’s up your alley. It’s about a young child sleuth who dresses up as a boy and roams a fairground and there’s a serial killer.’ And I was like, ‘was this book designed in a lab for me? This has all my interests.’ And then I found out that Henry Darger is in it! And he is one of my favorite random historical figures. I’m so curious how he wound up as a character in this novel.
EH: Thank you. Yeah, that was a really fun book to write. I mean, they’re all hard, but that one… yeah, I loved being able to just get lost in that creepy fairground milieu. But I first heard of Henry Darger probably in the late 70s, early 80s, and was really fascinated by him and then read more about him. About, I don’t know, 20 or so years ago, I reviewed this massive doorstop book about him that was probably the first major study of his work. So he’s somebody who I’ve been fascinated with for a long time.
I had shared some of his artwork and stories, many years ago, with my mother, who found them disturbing but interesting. And at one point, I don’t know… some years back, she said, ‘you should write a story in which Henry is a detective.’ We always call him by his first name. And I thought, ‘Oh, my God, Mom, that is a brilliant idea. Henry Darger, as kind of the amateur sleuth.’ But it was a while before I wrote that book, I think I was working on Hard Light, so that’s how long ago it was. Anyway. So, I just had it in the back of my mind. I actually wrote a first draft of it very, very quickly and couldn’t sell it. But Josh Kendall at Mulholland said, ‘this is actually really fascinating. And if you were to revise it, I’d like to take a look at it again.’ So, what happened was, a little while later, a year or so later, I ended up having a book deal with Mulholland for The Book of Lamps and Banners. And Josh said, ‘I would really like to read that Henry Darger book. Why don’t you write that one instead?’ So, I said, ‘okay.’ I wrote it. I had the bare bones from the earlier draft I’d done, which was a much shorter and much more terrible book. But, you know, I had his guidance and the guidance of Emily Gigliano, who was my editor at the time. And they were great in saying, ‘okay, this is what you do with this, don’t lose this, that.’
It was so much fun because I love doing research. If I could basically get paid to do research and never write the book, that would be my dream career. So I just fell down this total rabbit hole researching Riverview Amusement Park and Henry Darger and the early history of silent film and gay women and gay people at that time and Black African American magicians and just all of this stuff that I found out. And then I was really lucky because I just got to throw it all into the book. And it all kind of became part of the mix.
OR: I love how Henry lingered with you and then appeared after a certain amount of time in the book. All right. I just have a quick question for you to wrap up. What’s your favorite book that you’ve worked on?
EH: Oh, gosh, that’s a really hard question!
OR: I’m sorry!
EH: It’s okay! It’s hard because, you know, for the most part, I love them all. I think… one of my early novels I’m not so crazy about. But the rest of them, even if they’re flawed… or sometimes especially if they’re flawed, I still love them. But I think the one that I have the most emotional connection to is Illyria, which is a short novel that actually was originally written as a Christmas chapbook for P.S. Publishing. It was supposed to be very short, and then it ended up becoming a novel, a short novel. It was published by P.S. in the UK and then subsequently by Viking in the U.S. It is centered on a high school production of Twelfth Night, and it draws on a lot of my own personal history. It was basically a story I’ve been trying to write since I was 17 years old and saw a high school production of Twelfth Night that my then-boyfriend was in and a bunch of my other friends. And the production was… life changing. And it was not the first Shakespeare I’d seen! I’d seen a few professional Shakespeare productions at the Stratford Theater in Connecticut. But that one… I was so blown away.
And for years I was trying to write that story. There’s kind of flickers of it throughout quite a few of my early works, including my first novel, Winter Long. But I never got it right. And then I think it was in 2009 or 2010, when I was sitting down and was actually thinking about writing something that drew on The Tempest. And then I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this is it! I can finally write this book.’ So I did! It was written kind of for (and to some degree about) a very close friend of mine who died not too long after the book came out. But he did get to read it and he loved it. And so, for many, many reasons, it’s really close to my heart.
But I think that’s the one because I just had spent so much time trying to work to write that story and tell that story. And it was like the first story I really wanted to tell, you know, other than juvenilia. It was the first story I started trying to write when I was a teenager and I wasn’t ready to write it. It was years later when I finally was able to and I feel like I nailed it. I don’t always feel like I hit my mark, but with that book, I feel like I did. It won the World Fantasy Award. So other people felt that way as well? It’s a book I really love and I’m very proud of. It kind of makes me sad. Like, I could never go back and reread it, but I loved it. I loved writing and there was a lot of myself in it. That and Generation Loss, I think that would be the flip side of the coin.
OR: I can’t wait to read it. I’m so excited. You know, Twelfth Night is my favorite Shakespeare play. Not just because my name is in it.
EH: Yeah! You can read Illyria in an afternoon. It’s a very short novel!
OR: I’m going to order it at my local bookshop. When you were talking about how you were 17 and you wanted to write this and it sort of lingered within you until the right time, I was thinking, ‘you sat like patience on a monument.’
EH: Yes, exactly. I was like patience on a monument!! Yeah, I’ve seen that play probably 20 times in movies and on the stage. At least. Yeah, I could almost do it by heart.
OR: There should be a Shakespeare festival where crime writers get to perform their favorite plays. This is not a new idea. No one will ever let me put it together. But if I do, you know, I’m calling on you.
EH: I’m in!! I bet I could get other people in on it, too!
