Folger Book Club

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.

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 . . .

The Folger Shakespeare Library’s collection explores not only Shakespeare’s life and works, but also the plays’ historical context, source material, critical and performance histories, and the ways in which they inspire and are adapted by contemporary novelists.

Continuing Folger Book Club’s tradition of spooky October reads, we kick off this season with the authorized sequel to Shirley Jackson’s classic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House. Focusing on four artists coming together to workshop an adaptation of John Ford, Thomas Dekker, and William Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton in the “demented” mansion,  A Haunting on the Hill connects to several items in the Folger collection and even lets us explore if the Folger Shakespeare Library itself can be considered haunted.

Elizabeth Hand is the author of twenty genre-spanning novels and five collections of short fiction and essays. Her work has received multiple Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy and Nebula Awards, among other honors, and have been chosen as Notable Books by the New York Times and Washington Post. Her critically acclaimed novels featuring Cass Neary, “one of literature’s great noir anti-heroes” [Katherine Dunn] is being developed as a UK streaming series, and several of her other works have been optioned for film and TV. She is a longtime reviewer for the Washington Post Book World, and has written for numerous publications, including the L.A. Times, Salon, the Boston Review, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Much of her work focuses on artists and performers, particularly those outside the mainstream, as well as on the impacts of climate change. She is on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing, and for over thirty years has led myriad writing workshops, including Clarion West, Clarion, Odyssey, the Yale Writer’s Conference, Pike’s Peak Writer’s Conference, The Writer’s Hotel, and recently, the debut Salam Writer’s Workshop in Lahore, Pakistan and a futurist workshop at Wytham Abbey, Oxford, UK.  She divides her time between the Maine coast and North London. You can find her on Twitter @liz_hand and on Facebook @ElizabethHandAuthor.

Johnna Champion is the Assistant Curator of Collections at the Folger where she collaborates across teams on the exhibition spaces, classroom programming, and collection development. Previously, she has worked at Houghton Library on the Emily Dickinson Family Library, at Trinity College’s Long Room Library in Dublin on Oscar Wilde ephemera, and at the Library of Congress on the Poet Laureate Collection. Her research interests include descriptive bibliography, theatrical playbills, and the archiving of female political participation in post-colonial nation building.

Fall Folger Book Club selections are now available online and in-person through the Folger Shop!

Click below to purchase your copy of A Haunting on the Hill online or come visit us at 201 East Capitol St SE during our opening hours. Hours and directions

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