Halloween is my favorite holiday for dozens of reasons including but not limited to: mask-wearing, babies in adorable costumes, the color orange’s month-long rise to prominence, alcoholic punches called “Witches Brew” served in bowls with dry ice, horror movies with oil-painted portraits whose eyes move, séances/Ouija boards, and — most of all — haunted houses.
Like all the best tropes, the haunted house is an incredibly versatile narrative concept, able to carry the weight of a huge variety of themes; allegorically speaking, haunted houses can be about the dangerous trap of domesticity, the dangerous trap of family, the triumph of family over an external evil, the futility of escaping one’s own past, and so on. Also like the best tropes, a particularly innovative use of the haunted house can be especially satisfying as the reader’s prior context of the trope is subverted, messed with, or twisted into a new shape.
In honor of October, Halloween, and the spider-web decals on my nails, here are my recommendations for a pair of off-the-beaten haunted house novels:
The Forever House by Mark Rivers (possibly a pseudonym)
Published in 1995, The Forever House is a YA horror novel and a cross between the R.L. Stein aesthetic, the movie The Cube, and the House of the Undying scene in The Clash of Kings. On the first page, teen protagonist Amy Lowell is so despondent she wonders if someone had changed her middle name of “Misery.”
It takes 60 pages (out of 158) to get Amy into the Forever House but once she and her friends Jon, Becky, and Spike are trapped, the book moves like gangbusters. Every time they close the door, the house shifts around them, creating a laws-of-physics-don’t-apply-here interior maze. They run around in stone cells and ballrooms, dodging bullets and killer storms, finding the bones of their friends, and not dying by sheer force of will. When I was twelve, and I was scared of the dark and walking home from a friend’s house, I pretended I was Amy in the Forever House, squashing my fear so I could survive.
(As far as I can tell, The Forever House is out of print. My mom got rid of my copy and the only place I could find another one was on the Amazon marketplace. For under $5, it’s worth the purchase, even though I refuse to link you to a page where you can buy it for important reasons.)
The House of Discarded Dreams by Ekaterina Sedia
I have not read Sedia’s more popular Alchemy of Stone yet, but halfway through Discarded Dreams I knew I’d eventually read everything she has written. The cover of my paperback edition has a quote from The Guardian’s review: “Sedia is pushing the boundaries of fantasy writing.” For once, the blurb does not seem like awkward, puffed-up bullshit.
The House of Discarded Dreams is about first generation African American college student, Vimbai, who moves out of her professor parents’ house to live with a pale emo kid who has a pocket universe instead of hair and a girl who commands a pack of foxish creatures living under the front stairs. Their house expands and drifts off into the sea, again spitting in the face of the laws of physics (fuck the laws of physics). Their house also invokes the ghost of Vimbai’s grandmother, a vast desert, a Zimbabwe pastiche, and a “psychic energy baby.”
The book is not horror, but instead a speculative fiction version of a haunted house, heavy with roommates’ suppressed fears and desires, haunted by their family histories and personal foibles. My summary paragraph is so long because every single element Sedia introduces — zombie horseshoe crabs! An evil catfish-man! A fucking pocket universe instead of hair! — is so innovative and exciting that I just want to list them all, badgering you with them until you are in a bookstore buying the book already, or at least adding it to your Goodreads “To Read” list.
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