Sphere triumphs in three-way auction for Hand’s Haunting on the Hill

Sphere has won a three-way auction for Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill, inspired by one of Shirley Jackson’s classic tales. 

Senior commissioning editor Rosanna Forte acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Nancy Wiese, rights director at Hachette US. The novel will be published simultaneously by Sphere and Mulholland Books in the US in October 2023. 

A Haunting on the Hill is not only inspired by Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House but is the first to be “officially authorised” by the Jackson estate. Set 60 years after Jackson’s “genre-defining” novel, A Haunting on the Hill follows a troupe of theatre actors who use Hill House to rehearse their modernist staging of “The Witch of Edmonton”. “Horror after horror unfolds as the novel races to its terrifying conclusion,” wrote the publisher. 

Laurence J Hyman, Jackson’s eldest son and editor of Letters of Shirley Jackson (Random House), said: “The family of novelist Shirley Jackson is excited and pleased that Elizabeth Hand – herself a most talented novelist, and three-time Shirley Jackson Award winner – has agreed to research and write a family-authorised new work inspired by our mother’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House.  In conversations with Liz we have become convinced that she will continue our mother’s work in a style and form compatible with Shirley.”