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The unnamed narrator of 'Hare House' is a 30-something history teacher, who is forced to leave her job after a mysterious incident in which her whole class collapses in a fainting fit. 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. Essentially, this didn’t quite have enough plot for my taste, feeling to me more as directionless meandering, but also didn’t go deep enough in exploring its characters to read like a character study.
After completing an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, her first novel, Out of a Clear Sky, was published in 2008. Nothing wrong with that but the implications here play on certain negative tropes about women, especially single childless women. Sally Hinchcliffe was born in London but grew up all over the world in the wake of her father’s diplomatic career. I was sent an ARC of this creepy, modern gothic novel by Book Break in exchange for an honest review. I have always loved hares – they carry a sense of wildness and an other intelligence that rabbits lack and it is no wonder that they have been connected to witchcraft and shapeshifting through folk lore.There’s no explanation for the mysterious happenings and the book is so heavy-handed with the overall “takeaway” at the end. Such a shame, because the ideas were clearly there and the writing itself was actually good, but I was left very unsatisfied overall. The author does a great job with the settings and captures the dark, cold weather particularly well.
As the story progresses the lines aren't so clear and the forces that are taking effect seem to be surrounding, if not coming from her. 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. But I can’t help but feel the author intended the protagonist to be more sympathetic than she is, as I was like, “why are you inviting this woman into your home?I’m ok with a few things not being explained but the whole book and how it ended was just super vague. We follow a woman who moves into a cottage on the estate of a formally grand Scottish manor and begins to get to know the inhabitants of the main house. 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. It‘s a pity, because I think this book for one could have made very satisfying reading if it had stuck to its guns.
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. Sally Hinchcliffe’s Hare House is a modern-day witch story, perfect for fans of Pine and The Loney .I finished this book feeling short-changed and that's not a good way for a reader to feel at the end of a 5 day investment. If I hadn’t laughed before, I might have then, except that we had reached the churchyard gates and were standing staring at them. The themes are typical of this genre; mental illness, symbols of witchcraft, hares (inevitably), clay dolls, sprigs of Rowan, ancestral curses and the like. It started off well, quite promising in fact, it held my attention but then it seemed to build up into nothing.
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