She herself is a haunted house
The product of a lifelong possession
In less than a month, my first traditionally published short story will hit the shelves as part of the Modern Gothic anthology from Fly on the Wall Press. People are saying some lovely things about the book, such as ‘an enthralling example of gothic literature at its best’ (@beccareadsbooks) and ‘a ghoulish collection of stories perfect for the creeping feeling of autumn’ (@lilacslasting). If you’re interested, you can order this collection of six new gothic short stories directly from Fly on the Wall Press, via Waterstones or through your local indie bookshop. We’ve got a few launch events coming up too, in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and online. Ok, shameless plugging over.
Whenever people ask what my story ‘The Rot’ is about, I end up describing it as a haunted house story without any ghosts, which I appreciate sounds like a paradox, but encapsulates some thoughts I have about what a haunted house is, the emotions that define it, and how far we can push the parameters of the convention.
Like all 18-year-old aspiring goths, I devoured Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories across a series of A Level English Literature lessons that I remember as a fever dream of blood, depravity and animalism. A lot sticks with me from that experience, but perhaps nothing more so than these lines from ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ in which Carter writes, ‘She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.’ That image entirely redefined the idea of a haunted house to me. If a haunted house can be a person, then it doesn’t refer simply to an old mansion plagued by poltergeists. It can be a far more frightening prospect. Something which should be comfortable and familiar (a house, a family, a mind) that is inescapably tormented by malevolent forces, be those external or internal, real or imaginary.
This lodged itself in the back of my mind until I finally wrote ‘The Rot’ eleven years later. What I sat down to write, I first asked myself what haunts me. Not a legion of wealthy but morally bankrupt ancestors or the spectres of murdered ex-husbands. Rather, I am haunted by the ills of modern, late capitalist society. The cost of living crisis, the rise of the far right, advances in artificial intelligence and surveillance technology. I didn’t want to write about evil or sickness in a supernatural sense. I wanted to write about the very real dark forces that torment my own existence, and that of most orfdinary people like me.
Nearly every horror fan will know, almost word for word, the opening passage of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.” I could talk for years about the immense power of Jackson’s craft, but since hers is a ghost story, that’s another stream of consciousness for another day.
What is relevant, however, is the spin Alison Rumfitt put on these infamous opening lines in her debut novel Tell Me I’m Worthless, where she tells us: “No live organism can continue to exist compassionately under conditions of absolute fascism, even the pigs in Chile under Pinochet’s rule were observed to take part in political killings.” In this explosively experimental narrative, the haunted house is Britain itself and the ghostly presence is Britain’s legacy of fascism, colonialism and oppression. The difference between a ghost story and a haunted house story is something that clearly also preoccupies Rumfitt, as she writes: “There’s a difference between a ghost story and a haunted house story. This feels so basic, but also so hard to articulate. A ghost story is about the thing that it tells you it is about: a ghost, an ephemeral thing from beyond the grave, trying to contact the living. A haunted house story is about more than that. It is about structure, architecture, history.” In Tell Me I’m Worthless, Rumfitt tears Britain’s house down and finds a host of bloodthirsty phantoms lurking in its murky foundations.
From Spain to Sweden, it is the shadowy presence of male violence which threatens the prospect of domestic peace. Woodworm by Layla Martínez, translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott, is set on the outskirts of Madrid and centres around an impoverished grandmother and granddaughter whose shared home is haunted by the ghosts of their cruel and abusive male relatives. “In this house you don't inherit money or gold rings or sheets embroidered with the initials,” Martínez writes, “here what the dead leave us are beds and resentment. Bad blood and a place to throw you out at night.” A legacy of abuse and suffering has rendered the house inhabitable; generational cruelty loiters in the cracks between the floorboards and hides underneath the beds.
In Strega by Johanne Lykke Holm, translated by Saskia Vogel, teenage Rafa arrives to work as a maid at the Olympic Hotel, a once grand establishment which now stands empty and ignored. When one of her fellow maids disappears, Rafa and the other girls are forced to confront the the spectres of male violence and female victimhood which haunt the hotel’s halls; twin phantoms which linger behind the patterned wallpaper and beneath the plush carpets. Materially, it is presence of strange men which poses a threat, but it is the women gone by that the girls are truly haunted by. When Rafa is making dumplings, she finds herself possessed by thoughts of women workers before her: “The perforated ladle scooped [the dumplings] up and rescued them to a hand-painted plate of thick porcelain. A complicated pattern of roses and insects. I imagined the hand that had painted the plate. Thin and bony and with red-painted nails.” Phantasms of long dead women inhabit Rafa’s mind, begging her to heed their warnings.
Jo, the narrator of Jenny Hval’s Paradise Rot is haunted not by violence, but by loneliness. Newly arrived in England from Norway, she moves into a former brewery with elusive new housemate Carral, where her desire for intimacy seems to seep into the very walls of their shared home, leaving them sodden with longing. From the moment Jo arrives “the whole house [is] still black water.” Moss grows in furry patches on the floor, and water seeps into the pages of the single book Jo and Carral share readership of. Just like the house, their relationship bloats and festers as they reach a claustrophic closeness. Jo reaches out to Carral and finds that “her skin was soft, softer than I remembered, as if she was rotten too.” There is a sensuality and a tenderness to their cohabitation, but also a melancholy which manifests as a dank, clammy apparition, promptly dissolving any hopes of solidity.
I read some of these books before I wrote ‘The Rot’ and some after. I knew that some were inspiring me, and didn’t realise the influence of others until much later. In ‘The Rot’, my narrator is haunted by the presence of the titular dry rot which is slowly taking over her bedroom. As with any gothic image, the rot is a symbol of the wider issues plaguing her: the housing crisis, the rising cost of living, the hostile labour market. Everything in her life that she deems a failure - her last relationship, her aspirations, her living space - is conjured through the sight of the creeping rot. Spores of black mould dance around her as she tries to relax in the bath; the external walls of her flat crumble and expose her to the outside world; snails work their way into her shared kitchen and leave behind their spectral trails. Before long, she finds that it is not just her bedroom, but every aspect of her life which has begun to disintegrate.
The haunted house lies at the intersection of the twin definitions of the state of possession: “the state of being controlled by a demon or spirit” and “the state of being completely dominated by an idea or emotion.” The latter is these is the sensation I wanted to invoke in my story. There may not be a demon or spirit living in the walls of my narrator’s unhomely home, but there is something which controls and dominates her, which robs her of agency over her own life. This feeling of helplessness has come to me many times in my own life, when my job has become too overwhelming, my mental health frayed, my various rented box rooms unsafe and uncomfortable. It’s a feeling that takes the air out of your lungs and saps the energy from your limbs. A total listlessness; an absence of self. And that, to me, is scarier than any ghost.
A Partially Possessed Reading List
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt
Woodworm by Layla Martínez, translated by Sophie Hughes & Annie McDermott
Strega by Johanne Lykke Holm, translated by Saskia Vogel
Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval