The September House by Carissa Orlando
This is probably the best book I’ve read in quite a while, but I didn’t feel that way from the get go. So I wanted to go into a more detailed review, how I think about story and execution, and why my opinion changed. I’m going to start with a shorter, more general review in the style I usually write, then get into an analysis that will include spoilers.
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The September House is Carissa Orlando’s debut novel. Margaret and her husband, Hal, have bought their dream house. The only problem are the ghosts. Some are helpful, most are mischievous, and at least one is downright evil. The hauntings ramp up every September and this year, Hal just can’t take it and leaves. But Margaret is not leaving her dream house because she is uniquely equipped to cope with the horrors of September. But now, Hal is missing and their adult daughter, Katherine, is worried out of her mind about her father. She’s coming to town to help Margaret try to find him, but the horrors of September are just ramping up. Margaret needs to protect Katherine from the house and from the truth.
This book was recommended to me by my partner. She had heard about the book and, seeing it in our local bookstore, asked me if I’d be interested in it. After reading the jacket, I said sure and she said she also wanted to read it. She read it first and, though we didn’t talk about it much since I was also going to read it, she said she didn’t care for it very much. So I was a little trepidant to read it.
I didn’t care for it at first either. But the deeper I got into the book, the more the threads of the story came together and the more I liked it. The second half of the book is where Orlando hit her stride with the storytelling. I can highly recommend this book and say if you don’t care for it at first, hang with it because the full story is killer.
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If the gif wasn’t warning enough, here is an actual warning: I am going to go into much more detail about the plot as I talk about why I did and didn’t like the book. If you don’t want to know those details, stop reading this post and just go buy the book. This is your final warning.
I was not excited to find that the story was written in first person. I have not made it a secret that I don’t necessarily care for it as a style in novels. If this is your first time here, I’ll recap: I feel that first person limits the perspective in a story form whose length allows for a breadth and depth of characterization and narrative perspective. It seems to be the current zeitgeist of horror novels to be written in first person, but I don’t really understand why. It can work and there are novels I’ve read recently (like this one) that I’ve enjoyed that are written in first person. But it triggers an initial eye roll when I pick up a novel and it’s written in first person.
The limitations of first person narrative were on full display in the first half of this story. Margaret is our window to the story and as an unreliable narrator, it makes the story unreliable. Her house is haunted and she is very frank about the ghosts and her experiences of them. But the Big Bad, Master Vale, lives in the basement and she mentions him but actively avoids talking about him. This struck me at first as narrative contrivance rather than organic to the story. Additionally, because the story stays with Margaret, there’s a lot of repetition and running around in circles in the first half of the book. Even after the introduction of Katherine into the story, it reads like Margaret is playing keep away with the story. In that way, the reader is almost personified by Katherine in the story.
The turning point of the story came in chapter 13. After over a hundred and fifty pages of Margaret playing keep away with the story, she starts to delve into her history of the hauntings. Four years prior to the start of the novel, after seeing ghosts around the house and accepting them for what they seem to be, Margaret encounters Master Vale, the story’s Big Bad, for the first time. That encounter is tautly narrated and terrifyingly descriptive. This chapter was when Orlando started to hit the stride of the story, balancing the present time action of the story with the backstory narration of Margaret’s experience in the house and her marriage. This aspect of the story’s style just got better and better as the story went on.
This was also when the first person narration started to make sense, not as a convention of the current zeitgeist, but as a form contributing to the function of the story. I said that, in the first half of the story, Margaret is playing keep away with the story. While I was frustrated by this, it became clear that Margaret is also playing keep away with herself with the truth. It comes to light that Hal is an alcoholic and physically and mentally abusive to Margaret. But Margaret doesn’t want to admit it, doesn’t want to acknowledge it as a big deal, and bends over backwards to justify it to Katherine, who is the harbinger of the revelation. In the same way, it starts making sense how Margaret is able to live–and defend living–in a haunted house. Like an abusive relationship, she sees it as survivable as long as she figures out and then follows rules, and worth it for the good times.
One of the first questions that I think needs to be answered in haunted house stories is why don’t the characters just leave? How the story answers that questions is the absolute difference between a reader who is invested in the story and characters and a reader who is rolling their eyes. Margaret’s defense of continuing to live in the house seems contrived until the revelation of Hal’s abuse makes it make sense. “Everything is survivable” as Margaret says. She should know: she’s been surviving her whole life. That makes this story uniquely Margaret’s and unique to other haunted house stories.
I think that ghost/haunted stories are my favorite subgenre of horror and that goes double when the story also brings characters’ psychology into the story. Because it then adds an aspect of mystery to the story: are the ghosts real or is the character mentally unstable in some way? To figure this out, I pay attention to who is experiencing the supernatural in the story. If it’s multiple characters, the ghosts are probably real; if it’s only one character, then that character might be unwell. This story starts off with the assumption that the ghosts are real, as the characters of Edie and Father Cyrus experience the supernatural as well. As more of the story is revealed, Margaret says Hal experienced the hauntings as well, though it’s not clear to what degree outside of being annoyed by Elias and the expedition into the basement during the September previous to the story of the novel. But, being a first person story, it all comes back to Margaret’s perspective of their experiences. This assumption is questioned very effectively later in the story, when cops and Katherine confront Margaret with their perspectives, that Father Cyrus was senile and not in his right mind, and make Margaret question her experiences of the hauntings. They convince Margaret (and the reader) that it’s all been in her head and to surrender herself to police custody. She complies and is led off in handcuffs, which is a callback to earlier in the story, when answering Edie about leaving the haunted house, “They’ll have to take me away in handcuffs.”
The doubt this creates in Margaret’s and the reader’s minds is not left to linger for long, however. Before they can leave the house, the door slams shut and the cops start dying in gruesomely detailed ways. Master Vale emerges from the basement and drags Margaret away. She’s resigned to her fate, but Katherine tries to intervene to protect her and ends up in Master Vale’s clutches. For Margaret, this is the line that can not be crossed. She fights back with a ferocity and strength that she would not show for herself. In a confrontation that felt kind of like the Ritual of Chud from It, Margaret faces Master Vale in a battle of wills that she starts to lose, which is when Katherine joins her. Together, they fight him to a standstill again, but he starts to overpower them again. Then, Edie, who has been revealed as a ghost, joins in. Then, another ghost, Fredrika, joins in. Then, the other ghosts in the house join the fight, the children mutilating Master Vale in the same way that he had mutilated and killed them. These are abused and hurt people standing up to and driving out the person who hurt them. Together, they drive Master Vale from the house where, broken and bleeding, he dissolves and fades away. The ghosts heal from the wounds they wore in death and Margaret and Katherine sit on the porch, where Fredrika offers to bring them tea, a common refrain in the story. It’s an extremely satisfying ending that brings almost all of the threads of the story full circle.
I say almost all because I’m still left with questions for the story, mostly ancillary questions about Elias and his mother. I also wonder why Hal, who is revealed to be dead in the basement after trying to burn down the house, hasn’t come back as a ghost. Rather than feeling incomplete, I think that’s just a sign that Orlando wrote a very good story that I want to know everything about. Because this is Margaret’s story, it feels complete.
If you’ve made it this far, I hope that the aspects of the story I’ve discussed makes you want to read the story even more. I think this is the best book I’ve read in a long time and highly recommend it.
The Chimerical Dark 