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

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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. 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 blurb in the back mentions “a deeply unsettling modern-day tale of witchcraft” - it never got there. I’m ok with a few things not being explained but the whole book and how it ended was just super vague.

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. Striking up a friendship with her landlord and his younger sister, she begins to suspect that all might not be quite as it seems at Hare House. It started off well, quite promising in fact, it held my attention but then it seemed to build up into nothing. There’s no explanation for the mysterious happenings and the book is so heavy-handed with the overall “takeaway” at the end.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. Nothing wrong with that but the implications here play on certain negative tropes about women, especially single childless women. 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. The idea of this book had me really excited to read it as I love a witch story but this novel fell flat for me.

I'm left with questions that have kept me thinking about the story and what has happened, and if a book can keep my attention after I've finished it that's always a good sign for me. She rents a cottage from Grant, but also manages to ingratiate herself into the family's inner circle, becoming something akin to a friend or confidante to both Grant and his much younger, teenage sister, Cass. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Moving into of one the old, slightly run down yet quaint cottages on the estate of Hare House, exploration beckons towards it’s beautiful and wild surroundings but as the nights get colder and darker, it’s not just shadows that are looming as it becomes apparent there is a very good reason this place seems so abandoned and isolated.I also don’t mind an open ending and drawing my own conclusions but there were far too many leading questions left unanswered.

Through the narrative, we learn what had happened in London: our narrator’s class of girls fainting and falling unconscious together, which was mysterious and unsettling enough and which resulted in something of a witchhunt where our narrator was scapegoated and left under a cloud. As the plot hurtles towards its climax and the atmosphere thickens, the reader, just like the narrator, is forced to contend with increasing evidence that for the denizens of Hare House, witches are not the stuff of fairytales; they are an active threat.The experience reminded me a little of reading things like Gone Girl I just got caught up in wanting to know what was going on, even though I wasn’t expecting a satisfying denouement. It did not quite unsettle or inveigle its way under my skin as Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre did – oh look! 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. It is set in the modern day, there are planes and computers but it reads as if it is a long past era. That’s without even getting to the delicious intrigue Hinchcliffe cooks up around the tragic Hendersons, or how the book uses landscape.