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

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We have an unnamed narrator; a woman whose teaching career came to an end after a seemingly innocuous incident involving her A-Level students. The main character, a woman trying to leave her past behind as a mysterious event led to her losing her job in London, had all the cards to be an interesting, complex character but ended up being quite flat for me. Overall, Hare House is an engaging read with elements of the Gothic and folk horror woven subtly throughout. In the end, it actually did remind me a bit of Andrew Michael Hurley – not Starve Acre, and definitely not The Loney (to which the publisher compares it), but rather his best and most underrated book, Devil’s Day, for the slow build of unease against a beautifully realised pastoral backdrop. It did not quite unsettle or inveigle its way under my skin as Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre did – oh look!

Yet these questions go unanswered and after spending 300 pages of pretty prose to get to an inconclusive end I was thoroughly disappointed. Like Pine, Hare House is set in Scotland, and features a sprinkling of dialect words and more than a sprinkling of snow. The story is told by an unnamed protagonist who arrives on the remote estate of Hare House in Scotland having left her job at an all-girls school in London in mysterious circumstances. The story is filled with suspense and the possibility of discovering at least one manslaughter under the influence of alcohol and am answer to whether Janet is a witch and what happened to make her so bitchy and cold. I expect a book - even one billed as a psychological thriller - to have some kind of build up in the first chapter or so, but I got 1/4 of the way through and felt nothing had actually happened.

After the death of their parents and brother, only two now remain: Grant, the relatively young (‘not yet thirty’) master of the house, and Cass, his capricious teenage sister. I was sent an ARC of this creepy, modern gothic novel by Book Break in exchange for an honest review. 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. This is one of those books I find difficult to rate, I raced through it but at the same time I don’t think I really enjoyed it. The opening image of the hare, run over by a bus, dying a lingering death; the hares, stuffed and posed, in various tableaux in Hare House; the hares running alongside our narrator by the roadside.

Apart from the latter, these are all possibly unfair comparisons, simply based on trends in cover design. A beautifully written book, with wonderful descriptions of the Scottish scenery and an acute depiction of the protagonist through her own words, capturing the unspoken feelings and moods of a disappointed ‘less than young’ woman, who is, nevertheless, powerful in her own way. This was super slow and I expected everything to be explained at the end but there were 0 answers and 0 explanations to the ‘eerie’ things that happened throughout the book. A former London school teacher, forced to resign under mysterious circumstances, rents a house in the Scottish highlands where she meets an obstinate old woman and isolated, parentless siblings. I think it was made fairly clear what happened at the narrator's school and why she moved to Scotland.She’s of an indeterminate age, but the hint is that she could still (just about) have children but feels she’s wasted her best years on the wrong person. The narrator thinks little of the remark, but it will prove to be far more significant than she realises. I really enjoyed the writing style, the beautiful descriptions of the Scottish setting and the tension that was created as odd, creepy things began to happen. A stay on a country estate turns into a long-term let, and she grows closer to the residents of both the main house and its adjoined cottages.