Cameron Trost
Written on Jan 9, 2023
The Hills Know is a haunted house story that uses the tropes of the genre and classic plot devices in an original way. The writing is engaging and the characters believable to point of feeling that there might just be a touch of autobiography...a disturbing thought in view of how the tale unrolls.
The story starts with Mel and her husband, Jamie, moving from California to West Virginia after Mel inherits a house. They change jobs, move in, and start renovations...and Mel unexpectedly turns pregnant. This, the reader will immediately understand, becomes the key to what follows. Like I said, not an original premise, but Breanna owns her story and tells it well, weaving the idiosyncracies of the setting into the tale and exploiting local folklore and customs to often chilling effect. This is a brooding ghost story that turns the screw little by little, building the tension slowly until we reach a dramatic climax, and there are passages that will give the reader a shiver or two.
Having recently read Ghost Story by Peter Straub and A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson, I finished The Hills Know without a doubt in my mind that this is a far more successful example of the genre than those two famous novels. We sympathise with Mel and Jamie; her struggle to work out what is happening now and has happened in the past, and his patience as he bears the full brunt of the physical and psychological changes she is going through. The setting, characters, and particularities of West Virginia (not that I've ever even been to the States) carried the plot and added to its mystical flavour and infusing a contemporary story with colonial traditions of witchcraft and superstition. A short, well-crafted, and spooky novel for fans of ghost stories.