No tricks, no frills, just two mean houses
Look what do you want me to say the houses are mean ok
Look. This issue is going to be on the shorter side, and that’s because it’s primarily operating as a pretense to talk for a while about We Used To Live Here, a book I just read about a couple who buys a huge rickety house in the Oregon outback and are suddenly imposed upon by its previous owners.
What starts as a master class in slowly boiling anxiety (this weird family is just about to leave and then they want to look at the basement, and then they’re just about to leave but they lose track of one of the kids, as the whole time the snow keeps piling up outside) slowly shifts into something harder to name as people stop being where they should be or having the right names and even windows and hallways stop being where they’re supposed to be.
As someone who has both waking dreams and a shit memory, this book kept floating weirdly specific fears my way: What if something you were 100% certain of one moment was irrefutably not the case in the next? What if you watched someone walk around a corner and then they had never been there at all? What if you couldn’t find your family, but you knew, you knew, they were here somewhere? And what if, right in the middle of all this, some bitch came to your house unannounced and did a homophobia to you and your partner? In your own house?? This book is like a carnival haunted house and behind each page is a new social anxiety or existential dread.
You Should Have Left is one of the only other books I read that made me feel like this, fitting this odd quasi-genre of houses that are haunted not by anything as sentimental or human as a ghost, but by something colder, more angular, metaphysical. This 100-page baby is framed as the journal of a screenwriter who’s renting a house for the week with his wife and small daughter (the script is called Besties 2 and the contrast between this man’s rising, Stanley Hotel-esque stress level and his ultimate goal of finishing Besties 2 is artful).
The house gradually starts to abandon any logic; its angles don’t stay the same, reflections are untrustworthy, and passages keep showing up in the journal that the protagonist doesn’t remember writing. Like WUTLH, the ultimate feeling is one of distrust; as the reader you feel trapped along with the protagonist, ultimately completely unsure of anything from one moment to the next.
Great time!