Something in the Walls
By Daisy Pearce
Daisy Pearce’s latest, SOMETHING IN THE WALLS (Minotaur Books, 291 pp., $28), follows Mina, a young woman taking big steps forward in her life. She’s just graduated from college with a degree in psychology and a specialization in child clinical work, and she’s about to get married. But things are far from perfect. Between her doubts about her fiancé, the trauma from her brother’s recent death and her inability to find work in her field, Mina is struggling. While visiting a bereavement group she meets Sam Hunter, a journalist who quickly offers Mina a chance to put her new degree to work, suggesting she help him with an article about a girl named Alice who claims a witch is haunting her.
The job requires they move in with Alice, and there, Mina expects to find something she can diagnose. But things quickly get complicated. The residents of Alice’s village congregate in front of her house and claim she can talk to the dead. Inside the house, Alice’s parents might have reasons to be coaching their daughter to lie. Then people start dying. The more Mina learns, the worse things get, and soon it becomes clear that more than just psychology is at play.
At first glance, the elements of the story — witches, a child who might be possessed, a small town with a dark secret — may sound like a collection of tired horror tropes, but in “Something in the Walls,” Pearce makes these old dogs perform wonderful new tricks. The novel is full of superb, and sustained, tension and heavy doses of folklore and eerie history, making this a fun read that is also smart and engaging. This might be Pearce’s best book yet.
Beta Vulgaris
By Margie Sarsfield
Elise, the protagonist of Margie Sarsfield’s ambitious, impressive debut, BETA VULGARIS (Norton, 285 pp., paperback, $18.99), isn’t poor; she’s “broke.” To make money, she and her boyfriend, Tom, travel to a farm in Minnesota to work a sugar beet harvest.
The job is dull and takes place in the cold, but it pays well, and Elise and Tom get along with their co-workers. Then things go awry. Tom becomes moody. Elise, who stops taking her antidepressants because she can’t afford them, starts to question herself, and she develops a crush on her new friend, Cee. People start to go missing, including Tom and Cee. Also, do the beets they harvest seem to pulse like hearts? Contending with her anxiety, the unsettling crops, the disembodied voices she starts to hear and the disappearances, Elise begins to spiral.
The center of the narrative is Elise and her struggles with self-loathing. She’s afraid of being a racist and thus constantly examines her thoughts and biases, hates her “coastal elitism,” frequently worries about Tom not loving her, and considers herself a “stupid stupid moron.” With so much going on in Elise’s mind, the external horror phenomena that would ordinarily be the focus of a novel like this — little things like a puppy vomiting bloody worms, a strange rash that bruises Elise’s neck, the people vanishing — are pushed to the side. It’s a brilliant move that allows us to immerse ourselves in this complicated character while also giving the scary components of the story space to coalesce into something more disturbing, resulting in a marvelous atmosphere of dread.
This creepfest does suffer from a bit of overwriting — half a page devoted to soups, too much of the minutiae of the harvest — and Elise’s constant complaints and self-doubts eventually become repetitive, but her depth and honesty give this story a lot of power.
Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread
By Leila Taylor
For horror readers who want to get meta about the genre, Leila Taylor’s SICK HOUSES: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread (Repeater, 217 pp., paperback, $16.95) is a nonfiction “catalog of houses that have gone wrong.” It’s also a deep dive into the history of haunted houses in horror, and an examination of “the idea of home, and how horror perverts and manipulates one of the most personal and intimate experiences we have as human beings.”
Taylor’s inquisitive mind takes readers on a journey through seven house categories: American Houses, Brutal Houses, Witch Houses, Mad Houses, Little Houses, Forever Houses and My House. She gives readers a tour of the frightening architectural fare that falls under each classification and also unpacks the cultural reasons these types of buildings have a hold on our imaginations.
The journey through those categories is unpredictable and sometimes erratic, but Taylor is always amusing and insightful no matter where she takes us. Pages upon pages of detailed film synopses might be too much for some readers — especially if they’re unfamiliar with the source material — but Taylor’s mix of knowledge and humor is a treat. Anyone curious about houses with a history, and historically creepy houses, should check this one out.
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