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So the positives first- it's decently written and the prose helps the story flow. Hinchcliffe isn't too flowery and keeps it moving.
But the novel is weak in terms of both characterisation and plot. None of the characters are sympathetic, and none have much psychological depth. 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. The male characters have little depth (though I quite liked Davey and the ghost of Rory), Cass is a shrill hysteric, and the other women are either poorly sketched out (Helen, Kirsty) or tedious (the malevolent Janet). 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. The story is good. It's well paced and just spooky enough. I would have liked to gather more of a connection to our narrator, who we never learned the name of.The book is immersed in the landscape and its history and folklore and I couldn’t have written it anywhere else.” I can’t wait to read this again. It’s going to become that special thing, a personal classic, I can just tell. Adored it, everything about it.
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. She moves to a remote cottage in the countryside of Dumfries and Galloway, and tries to begin a new life, working as an online tutor, and as a rewriter of student essays/dissertations. It is very lonely, with only her gloomy elderly neighbour Janet for company - until she is befriended by her landlord Grant and his beautiful adolescent sister Cass. However, this turns out to be a mixed blessing. Grant and Cass's home, 'Hare House', is a gloomy place, decorated with multiple stuffed hares in human costume. And Cass, initially friendly, soon reveals herself to be volatile and manipulative - and to be convinced that she is being targeted by a witch. As her attitude towards the narrator becomes increasingly hostile, tensions rise to an unbearable level.... Moving into a cottage on the remote estate of Hare House, she begins to explore her new home - a patchwork of hills, moorland and forest. This book gave me a real sense of otherworldliness. It is set in the modern day, there are planes and computers but it reads as if it is a long past era. It is well written, very atmospheric, the descriptions of the crumbling old country house, the remote but beautiful location, the freezing weather and of course the spooky goings on in this picturesque corner of Scotland. Beautiful yet unsettling and at times unnerving and claustrophobic.Striking up a friendship with her landlord, Grant, and his younger sister, Cass, she begins to suspect that all might not be quite as it seems at Hare House. And as autumn turns to winter, and a heavy snowfall traps the inhabitants of the estate within its walls, tensions rise to fever pitch. Too late, I recalled myself,” she tells the increasingly sceptical reader. “A reaction, of course, was what she wanted, what they always wanted.” 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. 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. As the story develops it throws up so many questions. Why did the main protagonist leave her job? Why is Janet so strange? What happened to Rory? What is the meaning of the biblical reference? What is the significance of the hares? What is going on with Cass?
And the language! The writing! Crisp as fresh snow, sharp as broken glass, not a sentence wasted, not a word out of place.
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Sally was born in London in 1969 but says she “grew up all over the world” as her father served the Foreign Office in New York, Kuwait, Tanzania, Dubai, Zambia and Jordan.
A modern day witch story penned by Dunscore-based author Sally Hinchcliffe has been chosen as Waterstones’ October book of the month for Scotland. Sally, who talked about Hare House at a free event in Dumfries Waterstones on the High Street recently, said: “I’ve been delighted to see pictures of my book appearing in Waterstones displays up and down the country but it is particularly important to celebrate it here in Dumfries and Galloway. As anyone who has lived in the countryside will know, it is delusional to imagine, as Sally Hinchliffe’s middle-aged, female protagonist does in Hare House, that it harbours “a place of peace, where I might find refuge”. Rural communities seethe with as much intrigue as city offices and staff-rooms, and landscape is as menacing as cityscape.I was willing to endure a certain amount of ambiguity in the hopes of seeing how everything came together at the end, but it just didn’t? 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. There’s no explanation for the mysterious happenings and the book is so heavy-handed with the overall “takeaway” at the end. The main character was untrustworthy and didn’t seem like the right narrator for this story. Her, and the rest of the characters were, for me, a little too predictable, too much like cookie-cutter characters. I didn’t find the story as tense or as thrilling or as spooky as I thought it would be, and I felt it was almost a bit too timid and conservative for me. Born in London in 1969, I grew up all over the world as my father served the Foreign Office in New York, Kuwait, Tanzania, Dubai, Zambia and Jordan.
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