From award-winning author Elizabeth Hand comes the first-ever novel authorized to return to the world of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House--an eerily beautiful, strangely seductive, and genuinely upsetting (Alix E. Harrow) new story of isolation and longing perfect for our present time.
**Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Harper's Bazaar** 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 . . . A fitting--and frightening--homage. --New York Times Book Review It's thrilling to find this is a true hybrid of these two ingenious women's work--a novel with all the chills of Jackson that also highlights the contemporary flavor and evocative writing of Hand. --Washington Post Only the brilliant Elizabeth Hand could so expertly honor Jackson's rage, wit, and vision. --Paul TremblayJournalist Joe Talbert investigates the murder of the father he never knew, and must reckon with his own family's past, in this brilliant sequel to the national bestseller The Life We Bury (Publishers Weekly)
Joe Talbert, Jr. has never once met his namesake. Now out of college, a cub reporter for the Associated Press in Minneapolis, he stumbles across a story describing the murder of a man named Joseph Talbert in a small town in southern Minnesota.
Full of curiosity about whether this man might be his father, Joe is shocked to find that none of the town's residents have much to say about the dead man-other than that his death was long overdue. Joe discovers that the dead man was a loathsome lowlife who cheated his neighbors, threatened his daughter, and squandered his wife's inheritance after she, too, passed away -- an inheritance that may now be Joe's.
Mired in uncertainty and plagued by his own devastated relationship with his mother, who is seeking to get back into her son's life, Joe must put together the missing pieces of his family history -- before his quest for discovery threatens to put him in a grave of his own.