Charlotte Kersten

So What’s It About?

When Margaret and her husband Hal bought the large Victorian house on Hawthorn Street—for sale at a surprisingly reasonable price—they couldn’t believe they finally had a home of their own. Then they discovered the hauntings. Every September, the walls drip blood. The ghosts of former inhabitants appear, and all of them are terrified of something that lurks in the basement. Most people would flee.

Margaret is not most people.

Margaret is staying. It’s her house. But after four years Hal can’t take it anymore, and he leaves abruptly. Now, he’s not returning calls, and their daughter Katherine—who knows nothing about the hauntings—arrives, intent on looking for her missing father. To make things worse, September has just begun, and with every attempt Margaret and Katherine make at finding Hal, the hauntings grow more harrowing, because there are some secrets the house needs to keep.

What I Thought

This is some of the smartest and most entertaining horror I’ve ever read. I somehow started it without really knowing the premise, but I quickly became delighted by how effectively it brings us into the world of its remarkable narrator, an eternal optimist who will make a “heaven of any hell.” With a lot of humor and some great insight, we see how her unique form of resilience unfolds with regard to both her abusive relationship and her extremely extremely extremely haunted house. The parallels between the two are clear but never done in a way that’s patronizing to our heroine or the reader; if anything, I love how much respect it has for both.

I read this book with my mom, who has previously voiced that eternal question that many people struggle with regarding domestic violence: why does the victim/survivor stay? Talking about this story helped explore that conundrum better than any other conversation we’ve had before, especially when it came to the remarkable human capacity for adaptation to extremes.

So without further ado, here’s the list we came up with together of why someone might stay in a super haunted house:
-Frog in boiling water babey!!! Changes can happen very minutely and as they unfold you can be so busy following the new rules to stay safe/cleaning up the damage that it’s easy to to lose track of the big picture
-Dealing with all that danger and demand is exhausting and survival mode doesn’t leave much mental space for anything else
-There is a twisted kind of logic that can creep up on you so insidiously that you don’t ever realize how fully it’s taken over; at some point it all just makes sense
-Compartmentalizing works just great, actually
-You know what you can handle and you’ve been handling it Just Fine for a long time
-It could be worse! You’ve still got a beautiful house that you love and is sometimes amazing to live in!!
-Sunk cost fallacy- think of how much effort you put into buying the house, fixing it up and taking care of it so far
-If you ever tried to talk about what was happening, who would even believe you? At this point, most people just think you’re crazy
-It’s not safe for people to be around you while you’re in it, so who do you actually have left to talk to about it?
-“You don’t deserve this” and “No one should have to live like this” just do not feel true until one day they do
-Where are you going to go? You’ve been stuck in the house so long that you don’t have any way to start over
-Holy shit, look what happens when you try to leave

The author states in a note at the end how her work as a psychologist is underpinned by the fundamental belief that all behavior, no matter how irrational it looks to someone on the outside, is trying to serve a functional purpose to help that person survive. Our job is not to judge but to try to understand where someone is coming from and meet them where they’re at. To that I say YES and also congrats on writing an extremely entertaining horror book alongside conveying this point!!!!!!!