Five Books that Search Inside the Haunted House, recommended by Emma Cleary
When I was writing Afterbirth and someone asked me what it was about, I would usually give them the same, succinct answer: it’s a queer literary horror novel about sisters, monsters, and art. Or I might ask, “Do you like horror movies?” It’s a story about a fledgling artist, Brooke, who feels compelled to watch a lot of them, until the horror crawls out of the screen and takes up residence in her life.
I’ve always been interested in what drives us to seek out horror, and there have been numerous books written on the subject, such as Anna Bogutskaya’s Feeding the Monster. One idea is that horror helps us to process our fears inside a container—as Brooke’s ex-girlfriend, a horror cinephile, argues in my novel. The monsters of Afterbirth are capable of shifting the walls of our homes and burrowing deep inside the bodies we inhabit, but I think its most frightening moments happen between people, within our most intimate relationships.
What follows is an eclectic list of books about being in the grip of some other entity—whether by invasion, possession, or a bond we can’t escape. In these stories, intimacy twists into the uncanny, a lover slowly dissolves, the language of a long-dead poet bewitches the mind, and a house swallows up its occupants. Mothers, sisters, wives, lovers—these are the relationships that haunt. There is an emotional and physical weight to being intertwined with the people or things we love, and there’s also a shared sense that we are searching for something—some lost meaning, a ghostly sort of contact—inside the haunted house.
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