Hare House: An Atmospheric Modern-day Tale of Witchcraft – the Perfect Autumn Read

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Overall, Hare House is just a confusing and muddled book that barely provided any answers or explanation. But among the tiny roads, wild moorland, and scattered houses, something more sinister lurks: local tales of witchcraft, clay figures and young men sent mad. The mystery, the setting, the atmosphere… I thought something along the way might be a let down, and I’d fall into the same group of people that hadn’t loved it - I was absolutely wrong, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it; so much more than I thought I would. As I see it, there are two ways to read this story; one is the simple, straightforward, taking everything at face value way, the other is questioning absolutely everything.

Any cliches in the plot are made entirely new by masterful plotting, a uniformly fascinating cast of characters, sparing deployment of tension and eeriness, and, most of all, VOICE. She immediately insinuates herself into the household of the troubled teen girl and her handsome older brother. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I bought this book ages ago (a 99p special, I think), but I didn’t get around to it till now, possibly because I thought it might be a bit samey when compared to books like The Skeleton Key or The Dark Between the Trees or Pine.

I also found the endless animal cruelty (deaths of chickens, hares and a dog) gratuitous and sickening. The high quality of the landscape writing in this book, and a few passages of the dialogue, suggest that Hinchcliffe is capable of much more than the rather weak Gothic horror story she's produced here. We have an unnamed narrator; a woman whose teaching career came to an end after a seemingly innocuous incident involving her A-Level students.

Grant and Cass's home, 'Hare House', is a gloomy place, decorated with multiple stuffed hares in human costume. Hinchcliffe doesn't seem to be able to make up her mind whether she's writing a supernatural thriller, or a book about mental illness, and whether there really IS a witch, and if so, if it is the narrator, Janet, Cass or the enigmatic Ann (if she actually exists). The premise and title, teamed with a direct comparison to Andrew Michael Hurley in the blurb, made me fear it would be derivative; what with the isolated country house and the hare motif, I thought it might be too similar to Starve Acre. The narrator gets caught up in their lives, even though her shrewish neighbour Janet warns her not to.The blurb in the back mentions “a deeply unsettling modern-day tale of witchcraft” - it never got there. In terms of the characters, I found the main character very hard to like and she thoroughly annoyed me. The bewitching prose brilliantly evokes the bleak glories of a remote Scottish landscape, while the subtle shifts of plot and perspective lure the reader towards an unsettling denouement where nothing is quite what it seems. I also don’t mind an open ending and drawing my own conclusions but there were far too many leading questions left unanswered.

It’s difficult to go into too many details without spoilers but this falls somewhere between psychological and supernatural mystery – with a nod towards folk horror. A compelling chiller redolent of Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal , Hare House treads the treacherous line between the real and the supernatural with dexterity .The narrator’s relationship with Hare House reminded me of some other favourite novels with an imposing house at their core: at first The House at Midnight, and later, as things grow more sinister, The Little Stranger. True, it contains some of the same beautiful evocations of landscape and wildlife that made her debut so memorable. There’s an interesting mix of horror and beach read chick thriller going on here but for the most part it’s pretty boring. The family have suffered tragedies, but as our narrator spends more time there, she discovers that there are rumours and whisperings between the locals, suggestions of witches.