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The narrator becomes embroiled in a series of unsettling events related to the local community: hints of witchcraft, mysterious animal deaths, and disturbing effigies abound. A former London school teacher, forced to resign under mysterious circumstances, rents a house in the Scottish highlands where she meets an obstinate old woman and isolated, parentless siblings.
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. In the cottage next door lives the wily, menacing Janet, with whom the narrator strikes up a strained pantomime of friendship. 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. The narrator’s relationship with Hare House reminded me of some other favourite novels with an imposing house at their core: at first The House at Midnight, and later, as things grow more sinister, The Little Stranger.Any cliches in the plot are made entirely new by masterful plotting, a uniformly fascinating cast of characters, sparing deployment of tension and eeriness, and, most of all, VOICE. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. She immediately insinuates herself into the household of the troubled teen girl and her handsome older brother. The unnamed narrator is a disgraced teacher who leaves London for a rental cottage on the Hare House estate in Galloway.
I kept waiting for the narrative to falter, kept wondering if there’d be some development that would change the way I felt about it – but it is note-perfect all the way to the bravura ending, which made me almost squeal with glee. Overall, Hare House is an engaging read with elements of the Gothic and folk horror woven subtly throughout. 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. 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.Like Pine, Hare House is set in Scotland, and features a sprinkling of dialect words and more than a sprinkling of snow. 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? The narrator thinks little of the remark, but it will prove to be far more significant than she realises. The words Exod 22:18 appear in inscriptions throughout the setting – Exodus Chapter 22, verse 18 reading “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”.
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 r est of the cast is entirely forgettable, and I actually mixed them up pretty frequently aside from the mansion owner, his sister and the MC’s neighbour, who came across as very one-dimensional. 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. 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. I have, if you will forgive me, kept names to a minimum here, for reasons that will become understandable.