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

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I couldn’t help thinking if a man were to rent a house, people wouldn’t be so quick to have them doing chores and taking care of a seventeen year-old without learning more about them. I don’t like what the reveal suggested because it invalidates a lot of what the reader suspected was happening. There’s the odd tease and the odd flashback, but none of it really built up to anything and just seemed a tad repetitive. The central female character was especially problematic, self-deluding and manipulative which seemed to be attributed to her being lonely, single and on the verge of middle age: she reminded me of a younger version of Barbara in Zoe Heller’s Notes of a Scandal a novel I found intensely annoying but a lot of other people seemed to enjoy. Overall, Hare House is an engaging read with elements of the Gothic and folk horror woven subtly throughout.

This was a jolly good read, rattling through the events with never a misstep or a failure in its language -and the way Hinchcliffe describes the countryside was very vivid and compelling – and it was just what I was looking for at this moment. Hare House is hiding something sinister and damned and as winter slowly starts to tighten its hold it brings with it more than just snow which soon blankets everything it touches in a muffled silence and the dark, twisted history of madness, grief and loss begins to emerge all around to once again haunt those who still dwell on these grounds. 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.I did listen to this as an audiobook and I think the narrator did a great job which helped to make this more engaging than it might have been otherwise.

As the story goes on, you learn more about what made the woman lose her job as well as the mysterious past of the people who own the property. 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.Yet the cold left me feeling alive, as if we were indeed the only things out there that were still living, the only things moving in the whole landscape. the slow unfolding, the macabre details, the setting, the beautiful writing about landscape, the expression of both freedom and isolation, the ways in which the ending is delicious and unsettling at once. There was quite a lot I liked in this book - the setting and the people are quite interesting, and I‘m very fond of hares. I’ve seen such mixed reviews for this one, that I was concerned I wouldn’t love it as much as I wanted to.

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. It is set in the modern day, there are planes and computers but it reads as if it is a long past era. After completing an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, her first novel, Out of a Clear Sky, was published in 2008. A woman, about whom details are scant (she is never given a name; her age is only ever approximate; her appearance is never described) leaves London to ‘start a new life’ in rural Scotland. I adored this book, it gives the perfect mix of odd and eccentric characters, creepy locations, witches and some strange goings on!

Although it’s well-crafted in terms of prose style, atmospheric, and Sally Hinchcliffe’s highly effective at establishing a sense of place, the issues I had were with the story/plot and the portrayal of certain characters. 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 . In terms of the characters, I found the main character very hard to like and she thoroughly annoyed me. There’s a sense of creeping unease, and the narrator is careful to prime the reader for something major to go wrong. Plus the fact that I didn’t go in expecting it to be wonderful made it all the more pleasing that it is, in fact, wonderful.