Home, Deadly Home

The New Haunted House

In Part Five, we saw how writers like Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Engstrom made perfect use of the haunted house as a setting for domestic and psychological horror. Homeownership is the core of the American dream, and the home continues to hold potential for both comfort and horror, especially in times of economic turbulence. Contemporary writers continue this long-established trope and evolve it, setting stories in spirit-plagued apartments, residence halls, boarding schools, salvage properties, and other living spaces.

In Japanese writer Mariko Koike’s 1986 book The Graveyard Apartment, which was translated into English in 2016 and published by St. Martin’s Press, a young couple and their child move into a fantastic, newly constructed residence that’s surprisingly affordable and allows an easy commute for the husband. That low price might be due to the graveyard on one side of the apartment building…and the crematorium on another…and the Buddhist temple on a third side. The family’s pet bird dies on their first night in the house. Then the daughter announces that the bird has returned to deliver warnings about their new home. Almost immediately, the other tenants begin moving out. Soon the family is living alone at the top of the complex. And something evil is in the basement.

Rachel Klein’s debut novel The Moth Diaries (Counterpoint, 2002) straddles a few horror themes. There is a hint of the new vampire; one of the mysteries that obsesses the unnamed narrator is whether or not her fellow student Ernessa is undead. All the weird happenings at the girls’ boarding school where the narrator lives place this book in haunted house territory. The storyteller is at Brangwyn Hall because of her father’s suicide, and the school is haunted by the pain of the girls who live there. They grieve the loss of their parents; they self-medicate with drugs; they struggle with mental illnesses and eating disorders. And given that the narrator has been diagnosed with psychosis, as well as borderline personality disorder and depression, she is unreliable, to say the least. The story vacillates between real and unreal: could the book’s events be evidence of the supernatural or, rather, the very real attempts of young women to cope with trauma? The novel was adapted to film in 2011, directed by Mary Harron and starring Lily Cole as Ernessa.

Want more dormitory horror? “Poltergeist meets The Breakfast Club” was the Kirkus review blurb for Alexandra Sokoloff’s The Harrowing (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). Celebrated horror writers Ira Levin and Ramsey Campbell also had nothing but praise for this first novel. It’s Thanksgiving, and all the pupils at Baird College have left for home except for Robin Stone and four other students she just met. They are staying in a hundred-year-old dormitory, and a massive storm is approaching. This doesn’t sound bad at all, does it? It turns out there’s an “entity” at the residence hall that also decided to stay at the school during break, proving that you don’t have to go home to be haunted.

For something a little different, check out The Apartment (Blumhouse Books, 2016) by S. L. Grey, the writing team of Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg, which explores what can go wrong with a house-sharing service like Airbnb. Mark and Steph and their daughter are happy living in Cape Town, South Africa, until armed and masked men break into their home. Although no one is physically injured, the terrifying episode leaves the family wanting a change of scenery. They decide to swap homes with someone in Paris—who, it turns out, never shows up to stay at their place in Cape Town.

The family’s France vacation is filled with mysterious and uncanny happenings—the authors’ descriptions of shadows jumping across walls induce goosebumps—and their accommodations come with a creepy neighbor who warns them of vague danger and isn’t long for this world. When they return home seeking normalcy, parents and child sink further into darkness, which may be an effect of the Paris apartment or of their own making. For another example of the Grey writing team’s excellence at conjuring haunted spaces, see The Mall (Atlantic, 2011), in particular their description of a dark room full of clothing-store mannequins, discarded in a motionless pile…until one of them starts to move.

Over the years, the novelist Cherie Priest has written everything from Gothic and zombie fiction to Lovecraftian themes, but The Family Plot (Tor, 2016) is a haunted house novel set in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chuck Dutton owns a salvage operation that specializes in historic properties, and he has fallen on hard times. Desperate for a job, Dutton jumps at the chance to purchase the Withrow estate for stripping and resale. Unfortunately, the owner, Augusta Withrow, failed to mention that spirits dwell in the house. And the creepy cemetery on the property. And the fact that those spirits are irritated by something that happened in the past. The four people who arrive to salvage the property’s contents will face a dangerous presence that doesn’t like houseguests.

In Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It (FSG Originals, 2017), a young couple buys their first house and, rather than a leaky roof or appliances that need updating, the issues involve moving wallpaper and strange stains and writing on the walls. The townspeople have many secrets, and the house has a history. Jemc moves beyond typical haunted house tropes by playing the two main characters’ perspectives off each other in an alternating narrative. She shows the reader that the lines between exterior and interior, and real and not real, are thinner than we think. The book has been compared to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (Macmillan Publishers, 1898), Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (Viking, 1959), and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (Pantheon, 2000).

“The inability to trust ourselves is the most menacing danger.”

—The Grip of It by Jac Jemc