houses that haunt

knock knock, who’s there?

Oct 02, 2024

Before living in the middle of the Hungarian woods on the third floor of my international school, my family and I lived in a regular street in Baltimore, Maryland. There, I have a few foggy memories of a large, stone house across the street overrun with vegetation and seemingly abandoned. I don’t think I invented the memory of being dared to ring the doorbell by the other kids on the block and upon doing so, bolting right back down the driveway chased by the sounds of birds cawing and flapping from beyond the door.1 Any others have a neighborhood haunted house? Bonus points if you rang the doorbell too.

To welcome this season of dark nights, spooky tales and thin places we’ll begin with houses that haunt. Houses that are full of secrets, shadows and very wrong energy. Houses that have personalities, motivations and vendettas that are fueled by events not as buried as once thought. Each of today’s books uses different tools of terror to elicit a slowly building drip, drip, drip of dread in our protagonists and in ourselves as we’re all taken in by luxurious trappings that shroud sordid pasts.

Lock the door and turn on all the lights as you step inside one of these.

A HOUSE WITH GOOD BONES by T. Kingfisher

Samantha Montgomery travels back to her family home in North Carolina to visit her mother but it becomes immediately clear that all is not well. The house has been stripped of all its usual homey furnishings and nostalgic charm, her mother is constantly spooked and evasive and there is not one insect in her late Gran Mae’s sprawling rose garden. As a scientist who studies insects in archeological sites, bugs are Sam’s whole job so when ladybugs invade the house, ghosts invade her dreams and images invade old photographs she must discover the truth behind the hauntings, her family and their not so buried history.

Avid newsletter readers already know of my love for T. Kingfisher2 and this is no exception though its set in modern times and leans more towards horror than her usual fairy tale reenactments. While Kingfisher’s signature wry wit adds levity, there is still a palpable sense of wrongness here as things begin to grow more and more freakish and violent even when hiding behind pretty facades. Sam’s unique occupation as an archaeoentomologist gives her specific insights that clue the reader into the typically ignored or avoided world of creepy crawling creatures and she’s got the typical Kingfisher protagonist no-nonsense humor thing going on which is always amusing. There are some truly scary elements in this that creep up on you; that at first glance seem dismissible but soon build and mutate with some really interesting visual choices that are delightfully chilling. This touches on themes of inherited trauma, familial complicity and the dark side of ‘southern hospitality’ and includes a touch of romance, magic and a whole lot of swarming things as more than roots are buried underneath this house’s foundation.

Honestly, there just aren’t that many good reasons for the average homeowner to keep jars of human teeth lying around.

STARLING HOUSE by Alix E. Harrow

Opal lives in the dead end town of Eden, Kentucky with her younger brother and dreams of escape. Also prominent in her dreams is the isolated, mysterious Starling House, enthralling and repulsing her in turns. When she finally confronts the house, and its unconventionally hot and brooding occupant Arthur, she finagles her way into a job to investigate its shadowy goings on. As she grows closer to the house’s origins, and Arthur, nightmares begin to inhabit the real world and the answers she finds point to something more dark and sinister than she could have ever imagined. Opal will need to find her place inside a story that has become all to real if she is ever going to save her brother, her fledgling relationship and the rotting town of Eden.

I first mentioned this one as one of my favorite 2023 reads and completists of this newsletter will know that Harrow has already shown up here a few times and this won’t be the last of her books to show up this month.3 This is a gothic fantasy romance that follows some of the classic tropes while subverting others. I just attended Harrow’s paperback release event tonight and she said she wanted a “cannier and meaner version of a gothic heroine” and while writing asked herself “What if a horrible house was your buddy?” and I was tickled. Indeed, Opal isn’t nameless like Rebecca’s narrator nor is she completely alone in the world like Jane. She’s scrappy, stubborn and perceptive and we get her first person POV along with Arthur’s third person narration as their romance builds and the terror rises. Harrow includes some semi-cheeky footnotes4 throughout that lend historical realism to the tale and her writing is lovely, atmospheric and consistently compelling as she explores themes of ‘the necessity of desire’,5 generational trauma, relationship to nature, claiming one’s home, the acceptance of light/dark internally and externally and, a common theme in her works, stories within stories and their long reaching power. I loved the pining, push/pull of the romance6, the waking nightmare imagery, the fairytale/mythic ingredients and the house’s unique personality that is both terrifying and playful with its Beauty and the Beast-like nature.

While the cover is pretty, I don’t think it matches the harsh, shadowy nature of this book and wish it better aligned with the internal illustrations which are thorny yet ethereal.

The House is restless, too, settling and shifting beneath his feet. The fire won’t stay lit and the forks clink tunelessly in their drawers. The light in the kitchen pops as he passes beneath it, the bulb staring down at him like a mournful gray eye.

MEXICAN GOTHIC by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

After receiving a manic and disturbing letter from her cousin, Noemí is sent to High Place in the remote Mexican country to see how Catalina is getting on with her new husband’s family. A fashionable socialite in the 1950s, Noemí is anxious to prove to her family that she is smart, dedicated and wants to finally escape the stigma of flighty shallowness they’ve always branded her with. She finds her cousin a pale, sickly version of herself, the house dark and gloomy and the family rigid, exclusionary and secluded. Tenacious and hard to intimidate, Noemí makes a tenuous connection with an unlikely ally as she attempts to discover more about the history of the house until it begins to infect her with frighteningly real visions, bouts of sleepwalking and golden ghosts as the lurid walls pulse and swirl around her. Uncovering secrets while doubting her sanity means that discovering the family’s true agenda may come too late for Noemí to escape it.

We’re thrown into the chilling tone of the story quite quickly as Catalina’s letter claims “The house is sick with rot, stinks of decay, brings with every single evil and cruel sentiment” and she is afraid of “the restless dead, these ghosts, fleshless things”. Along with Noemí, we become unwittingly entranced by the landscape of forbidding mountains and mist swathed forests before arriving at the looming and rundown High Place. The house is full of oil lamps, silent servants, damp furnishings, sickly yellow walls and a repeating ouroboros motif all of which don’t seem to bother the English family who are so obsessed with their ancestry that they’ve had “European earth” shipped over when they first arrived in Mexico. The family is very weird: imposing bizarre rules and fixating on topics like race and eugenics, introducing the ideas of “intermingling of superior and inferior types”7 into dinner conversation.

Noemí is a great heroine, plucky, blunt and modern and is stymied at every turn by this deeply traditional family so watching her begin to unravel is truly sickening as she fights manipulation, coercion and madness and her ghostly nightmares begin to crawl into the real world. I loved the mixture of pseudoscience, myth, fairy tale and ghost story with the traditional gothic trappings of fire, madness, the supernatural, forbidden romance, secrets within secrets and a bit of a murky ending. A very moody read that explores female revenge, the violence of colonialism and misogyny with some truly grotesque, spine-chilling imagery and freaky reveals set in a different environment than I’ve read before in the genre.

I love this cover; the sickly green walls that surrounds a sumptuously dressed belle is an intriguing combination. Ooh the paperback has an fun, pulpy stepback8 and the author created a playlist!

The walls speak to me. They tell me secrets. Don’t listen to them, press your hands against your ears, Noemí. There are ghosts. They’re real. You’ll see them eventually.