That's not a house! That's my wife!
When the house is a character and that character is a friend
I’ve got a big soft spot for The House Being A Character. We love our homes, endow them with our personalities and artifacts from our lives and spend such wide swaths of our lives within them, and sometimes it doesn’t seem like such a stretch that they would start to love us back.
The titular Starling House is a foreboding, dilapidated ancestral manor on the edges of Eden, Kentucky, heavy with the weight of generations of people fighting eldritch horrors behind its doors. It is also, kind of, an attention-starved dog that would very badly like for its gloomy single tenant to get a girlfriend. Specifically it would like him to keep inviting in Opal, who keeps having dreams about the house after its iron gates bit her a little bit and under whose cleaning regime the house starts to brighten up maybe a little more than Windex alone would explain.
I’ve been struggling to find a place for Ninth House, one of my favorite reads of the year so far that has been proving difficult to categorize. Alex (short for Galaxy) Stern has gotten a pretty unconventional scholarship to Yale that involves working with an organization that polices the eight secret societies’ use of magic. In a world that is incredibly alien and often hostile to street-smart Stern, the Ninth House itself starts welcoming her in with creaks and groans that somehow sound friendly as its wards promise her protection she never knew in her old life. And when her mentor disappears and she’s tasked with finding a way to bring him back while keeping the societies in check on her own and investigating a suspiciously magicky death, the house becomes one of her few allies.
If the Ninth and Starling Houses are friends, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years’ Akbar Manzil, perched on the coast of South Africa, is more like a ghost, a palpably vulnerable grief, a century-old wound that never healed. As new tenant Sana explores the mansion that has been converted into cheap apartments, the house (and the titular djinn, still trapped in its hundred-year-old tragedy) does its best to shrink away from her to keep the sad secrets of its east wing from being exposed or the journal that tells its story from being found.