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

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In terms of the characters, I found the main character very hard to like and she thoroughly annoyed me. 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. I also don’t mind an open ending and drawing my own conclusions but there were far too many leading questions left unanswered. 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. In the first brisk days of autumn, a woman arrives in Scotland having left her job at an all-girls school in London in mysterious circumstances.

As her attitude towards the narrator becomes increasingly hostile, tensions rise to an unbearable level.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. There are moments in this book that comfort and console me, and others that leave me chilled to the bone – not in a ‘spooky’ way, but existentially. As I see it, there are two ways to read this story; one is the simple, straightforward, taking everything at face value way, the other is questioning absolutely everything. Witchy, mystical and intriguing, this book was a quick read that had a lot more to it than I was expecting.

There’s the odd tease and the odd flashback, but none of it really built up to anything and just seemed a tad repetitive. Not a book I am trying to claim is objectively perfect, but a book that is perfect to me, that feels precisely calibrated for me. Her landlord, Grant Henderson, and his rebellious teenage sister Cass are still reeling from the untimely death of their shell-shocked brother Rory. As a snow storm closes in in the novel’s final chapters, trapping everyone in the big house, things come to a head as emotions and the atmosphere runs riot.There was quite a lot I liked in this book - the setting and the people are quite interesting, and I‘m very fond of hares. I adored this book, it gives the perfect mix of odd and eccentric characters, creepy locations, witches and some strange goings on!

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. My difficulties with this were partly linked to the fact that the tension between the psychological and the supernatural wasn’t resolved in a way I found particularly convincing, and partly to the representation of older and/or single women which seemed quite stereotypical. If anything, I would have liked to have known more about the dog-lady, but that’s because I live with three rescued long-dogs.

The premise and title, teamed with a direct comparison to Andrew Michael Hurley in the blurb, made me fear it would be derivative; what with the isolated country house and the hare motif, I thought it might be too similar to Starve Acre. As the story goes on, you learn more about what made the woman lose her job as well as the mysterious past of the people who own the property.