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.
Hotel Almighty by Sarah J. Sloat
I first encountered Sarah J. Sloat’s found poems in a writing workshop and instantly fell in love. Hotel Almighty takes pages from Stephen King’s Misery and transforms them into individual works of art, making poetry out of horror. On some pages, King’s original sentences are only partially obscured, vibrating beneath Sloat’s pencil shading, collage art, and other markings. The lifted fragments of text that make up Sloat’s poems tell an entirely different sort of story, though often suffused with the ghostly—a little voice caught in a well, darkness prologued by darkness, “whatever it is that’s making that / wonk-wonk inside.” It’s the process of searching and sifting through the language that fascinates me, and feels analogous to how many of us consume horror, adapting little pieces to construct and clarify our own stories. I was very pleased that Sarah J. Sloat granted permission for me to use one of her lines in Afterbirth, one that feels ripe with the idea of something wrong invading the body: “you could hardly have missed the Thousands of impossible flowers trying to be born.”
Her Body Among Animals by Paola Ferrante
Paola Ferrante’s genre-bending stories are full of monsters and hauntings. Its terrors often arise through the (re)combination of the fragile human body and some sort of ecological disruption. In Ferrante’s world, wives become spiders, a girl tries to save her sister from growing a mermaid tail, and a sex robot subverts her programming. In “Everyday Horror Show,” postpartum depression is a kind of poltergeist besieging the nursery with cold spots and strange noises, and eventually manifests as a “weeping woman” that steers the second-person narrator and her child into increasing danger. The language moves associatively between environmental anxiety, infamous hauntings, and, ingeniously, methods for creating movie sound effects, the narrator’s previous line of work: “Anyone would have trouble sleeping in your house, the stairs creak, and the doors bang, and the TV turns on like the radio in the Thornton Heath haunting, you’d swear by itself, so you end up watching how bees are dying and all the fruit in the world will be gone.” The collection is composed of compassionate, clever, and devastating prose that carries the reader to unexpected places.
White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
In Helen Oyeyemi’s multivocal novel White is for Witching, a family home turned boarding house becomes a living, breathing presence that haunts its inhabitants across generations. The disappearance of Miranda Silver is explored through the perspective of her college girlfriend, Ore, her twin brother Eliot, and 29 Barton Road itself. The story tackles racism, anti-immigrant violence, grief and illness: when her mother dies, Miranda’s childhood eating disorder grows even worse, her pica a “strange hunger” that makes her ingest chalk, a substance redolent of the fraught Dover setting (the closest English point to mainland Europe). The sentient house has a voice that taunts and manipulates its inhabitants: “Miranda has pica she can’t come in today, she is stretched out inside a wall she is feasting on plaster she has pica.” White is for Witching is richly gothic—Miranda’s room is described as a psychomanteum (a chamber for mirror-gazing and conjuring visions), and the book’s passages have the claustrophobic, disorienting feel of navigating some strange, foreboding labyrinth. I read this book more than ten years ago but the menace of Oyeyemi’s haunted dwelling (slash nation) has stayed with me.
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Firstly, can we pause to acknowledge the wonderful fact that Julia Armfield’s gorgeous, elegiac novel has an epigraph from Jaws? The novel’s lyrical opening line encapsulates its eerie allure: “The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.” The dual narrative alternates between Leah’s account of a mysterious deep-sea mission and her wife Miri’s attempts to care for her when she comes back… well, wrong. Leah speaks only of the sea, her skin “silvered over,” submerging herself for long hours in the bath. The mostly ordinary domestic setting of the present-day narrative—at one point, a friend turns up to help and presents Miri with a cooked chicken—intensifies the otherworldliness of the deep sea, the nightmare of Leah’s changed state. As Miri tries to absorb what is happening to the woman she loves, Leah sinks further and further away. The novel marks their descent through four ever-darkening ocean depths: the Twilight, Midnight, Abyssal, and Hadal Zones, and ends in a sort of liminal space between land and ocean, being and transcendence. It’s a gorgeous excavation of loneliness, yearning, and estrangement from the people we love most.
A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
This stunning book is variously described as a memoir, a quest, a keen, a lament, and an echo. Doireann Ní Ghríofa sets out to uncover the story of eighteenth-century Irish poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, chronicling her own life as a writer and mother in the process. One of the central, most startling images of Eibhlín Dubh is of her kneeling to drink handfuls of blood from her murdered husband’s body. Much of the book’s terrain is the body and its transformations: pregnancy, motherhood, breast-feeding and not breast-feeding, reproductive surgery. Childbirth and childrearing are visceral and palpable on the page: Dubh’s body howls open, the author’s dreams are haunted by milk, afterbirth is a “red room.” Ní Ghríofa searches the internet for images of placentae, “so labyrinthine, so meaty.” There’s a chapter set in a dissection room, the ending of which made me gasp aloud. When Ní Ghríofa reaches the end of her research, she finds it difficult to let go, and describes lying down to sleep still grasping Dubh’s “nothing-hand,” tight enough to leave marks on her own palm. The language itself is so embodied that reading it feels like a possession. It’s unlike anything else.
Bonus: Three books from my to-be-read pile that feel as though they might belong on this list. In The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee, single mother Alice Chow wakes up one day to discover that all her household chores have been completed—but by whom (or what)? In Feast While You Can by co-authors Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta, Angelina Sicco becomes possessed by a demon who lives in a cave system in rural Italy. And in Sisters by Daisy Johnson, July and September are two siblings born less than a year apart who become enmeshed like “unfinished doppelgängers” after moving into Settle House on the North Yorkshire coast. I can’t wait to read these!