Haunted houses and ghost stories are often kissing cousins in the horror genre, and mental illness is frequently close behind them. Sarah Gailey‘s latest, Just Like Home, has a haunted house that doesn’t need mental illness or spirits of the dead to send a chill down your spine. The thing at fault here is something much more sinister: love.
Vera Crowther has been away from home for twelve years, but it didn’t feel like home for the last five years she was there—ever since her father was arrested as a serial killer who butchered men in the basement. Vera and her father had always been close, while she and her mother were never on the best of terms. The years of separation have been better for both of them, with Vera working whatever menial job she can until someone makes the connection between her and her infamous father, and her mother exploiting the macabre connection to the house to pay the bills. But when her mother calls for help at the end of her life, Vera comes.
The house is almost like Vera left it, but she and her mother are not alone. Her mother has rented out the back shed to an artist—and the son of the true-crime writer whose book catapulted her father to infamy. There’s something else there, too, though, something that moves Vera’s bed and whispers in Vera’s ear when she’s asleep. Vera has sworn she’s only back in town long enough to help her mother until she dies and then clear out and sell the house, and the reactions of the townspeople to her return only reinforce her determination leave as quickly as possible. But as the days wear on, the memories bog Vera down and the house’s grip on her grows tighter and tighter.
Just Like Home is not an easy book to read, though that’s not because of the murders. Gailey renders most of those in hardly more than glimpses Vera gets between floorboards, or the matter-of-fact acknowledgement of blood stains and tools of torture. Even Vera’s father comes off as a sympathetic character; whether his reasons for kidnapping, torture, and mother are honestly held, Vera believes him. Maybe she believes him a little too much. The most intense moment of acute violence was enough that I had to close the book for a minute and stare at the sky for a while.
But what is more difficult to read, and what persists like barbed wire running throughout, is the strained and often abusive relationship between Vera and her mother. Vera’s constant efforts to please her mother are as painful as they are fruitless. Although her father is clearly disturbed and, again, a serial killer, he is also capable of being a parent. Vera might be too eager as a child to believe her father’s excuses and explanations, but it’s easy to sympathize with her dance through the domestic minefield that is her life in search of parental love. Even, and perhaps especially, when that dance takes her to dark and transgressive places.
In that way, the haunting in Just Like Home is twofold: there’s the thing that goes bump in the night, and then there are the memories that lurk in every corner. The unspoken words between mother and daughter. The decades-old hopes and dreams between them that the other is incapable of fulfilling. It’s far too close to far too many parent-child relationships to stay corralled in the pages of a book, which is what makes it so frightening. The haunting itself is a kind of relief by comparison, one that Vera couldn’t find in the real world.
Ring Reads 