Family means nobody gets eaten by a ghost
Shoutout to childhoods fr. Gotta be one of my favorite breeding grounds for The Horrors
Families. Can be scary. As a concept, I mean. The very idea of people who have known you your entire life, family as a place run on group consensus where a version of you has been pressed in wax or preserved in amber or possibly poured into a mold when you were still small and not set yet, a blueprint resistant to the forces of time and change and growth, creates a lot of opportunities for tension. What do the people who made us think about us, and who gets the final say in who we really are?
This is my way of telling you this issue is about good ol’ down-home family horror.
I love a good Sibling Dynamic, and How to Sell a Haunted House has it in spades. The novel follows two estranged siblings going through estate execution after the untimely passing of their parents, who ran a beloved puppeteering ministry and whose house, consequently, is packed to the gills with handmade puppets.
What initially seems to be a classic over-responsible older sibling/irresponsible younger sibling pairing gets more complicated as we get backstory: Both of them have had inexplicable experiences with one of their mother’s puppets in particular. His name is Pupkin and I still fear him a year out from reading this. As their experiences in the house get spookier and buried memories start to reemerge, the siblings have to shake each other out of heavy denial and confront foggy and disturbed pasts with this house and the demons within if they want to move on, or even get out alive.
I really wanted to include both of these in a special one-off issue called “Books where siblings unpack trauma through the power of puppets” because it’s weird that it happened twice. Magic seems to run in Thistlefoot’s family of Russian-Jewish-American theater performers, the Yagas: Bellatine, a woodworker, can give life to objects and her brother Isaac can impersonate anyone. And that’s before they realize they’ve inherited a house from The Old Country that walks around on chicken legs. This novel has gorgeous through-lines about generational trauma and questions how survivors can ever plant something new in earth scorched by violence and prejudice, and about how the things about ourselves we’re taught to be ashamed of can provide our greatest strengths.
Dead Eleven follows a man who travels to an island in the middle of Lake Michigan where his sister was last seen, herself following a message she found carved into the floor of her dead son’s room. He’s got regrets about his estrangement from his sister, and it seems like he’s not the only one stuck in the past: The entire population of the island refuses to leave the year 1994, wearing 90s clothes, watching VHSes, and discussing the OJ Simpson case ad nauseum. They follow the same routine every night and their only advice to their visitor is to keep the blinds closed.
This book has a great combination of an outsider who’s trying to get to the bottom of things and a teenager, born and raised on the island, who knows The Big Secret and thinks it’s stupid. A great exploration of the logical, fantastical end of an attempt to avoid feeling a loss by never moving on.
Diavola is potentially my favorite thing I’ve read this year, and not just because it hits my ultimate sweet spot of having a 1) ghost who is also 2) Italian. We meet the protagonist, Anna, as she prepares for a family vacation to the Tuscan countryside.
We see her bracing herself for this reunion, and soon enough, we see why. Everyone has problems with her. Anna conceives of her family as a barrage of almost physical tensions: her codependent twin brother wrapped around her waist, her mother trying to steer her by the shoulders, her sister tapping her with a finger to get her attention. Perhaps that’s why she’s the first notice another presence in their rental, a house called Villa Taccola. A similar palpable energy is emitting from the tower at the center of the house, to which the family has been given an ornate iron key but told not to open.
Anna is given a lot to handle, from visions of bodies in the pool, to trying to herd her dismissive, combative family out of the path of danger, to grappling with a yellow-haired medieval ghost who seems to have latched onto her with both hands. I loved this book for its dual explorations of a very literal haunting and the kind of gnarled family dynamics that fray when they’re exposed to unbearable pressure. I also really love Anna as a character it is objectively a mistake to haunt, who defies being haunted at every turn and develops a contentious back-and-forth with a 14th century arsenic-maddened ghost. Have I said I love this book enough yet?
