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

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While I understand that this goes hand in hand with an unreliable narrator, it just really fell flat. After completing an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, her first novel, Out of a Clear Sky , was published by Macmillan in 2008. It did not quite unsettle or inveigle its way under my skin as Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre did – oh look! 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. I didn’t sympathize with any of the main characters and the side characters were hard to tell apart.

Such a shame, because the ideas were clearly there and the writing itself was actually good, but I was left very unsatisfied overall.

As her attitude towards the narrator becomes increasingly hostile, tensions rise to an unbearable level. 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. 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. I gave myself some time to process (a little longer in truth than I’d planned to be honest), trying to get some clarity but several weeks on I’m still no further in this. The unnamed, unreliable narrator (two pet hatreds of mine) is both dull and creepy, and I object to the way that Hinchcliffe implies (through both her and Janet) that unmarried women above a certain age are unhinged.

Hare House is also brought to life brilliantly, down to the creepy taxidermy which 'decorates' its walls. After completing an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, her first novel, Out of a Clear Sky, was published in 2008. At first she seems to be on holiday, but then she just offers to rent on a more long-term basis, and she’s in. I adored this book, it gives the perfect mix of odd and eccentric characters, creepy locations, witches and some strange goings on! We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.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. She wasn't an entirely likeable person but seemed so self-righteous in her own opinions that, even if I had wanted to like her, there was no hope of it. 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.

Everything about the story, how it’s told, how it’s written, the strength of the voice, the momentum of the plot. It‘s one of those books (there’s quite a number of them) where there seem to be all sorts of supernatural occurrences taking place for the biggesg part of the story - there‘s talk of witches, for instance - and then in the last few chapters, course is brusquely changed and suddenly, it‘s all about psychological issues. 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. The locals keep to themselves, the village not easily accessible when the snow hits, an old estate house with what appears to be taxidermy gone mad on display for all to see, and a neighbour who perhaps has more secrets than Hare House.When you finally find out why the narrator lost her job, the event itself and the investigation after were so improbable that I just don’t believe it would ever happen that way, even in fiction. Yet these questions go unanswered and after spending 300 pages of pretty prose to get to an inconclusive end I was thoroughly disappointed. This book very much leaves you on edge, questioning your own thoughts and feelings and seeing shadows where there are none.

We get deposited into the story in the middle: something has happened in our narrator’s recent past and she has fled into Scotland, renting a cottage in the grounds of Hare House on something of a whim.It doesn't matter if you're into Stephen King, Octavia Butler, Jack Ketchum or Shirley Jackson, this is the place to share that love and discuss to your heart's content. 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. By the end of the book I couldn't care less if all of them (Davey and perhaps Kirsty and Dougie excepted) had been devoured by a giant carnivorous hare.