HOUSE OF BETH, by Kerry Cullen
At one point in Kerry Cullen’s debut novel, “House of Beth,” its protagonist, 28-year-old Cassie Jackson, defines the time span of the book’s narrative as “the year I was married.” The nonchalance of this phrase is an understatement, given the domestic drama and paranormal activity that ensue. But it encapsulates one of the book’s persistent themes: the way transitory experiences — a fleeting friendship, an impulsive kiss, a one-off act of violence — can be brushed aside, casually or deliberately, by their participants. That is, Cullen suggests, until memories come haunting.
The story begins when Cassie, a literary agent’s assistant in New York, suddenly burns out at work, breaks up with her loving girlfriend, Lavender, and retreats to her hometown, Elwood, N.J. There, she reconnects with her high school best friend, a metal and glass architect named Eli McKean who lost his young wife, Beth, just six months earlier. Still wearing the same plain black baseball cap he did over a decade before, he seems impervious to change, the perfect weight to anchor Cassie in her fragile state.
Things quickly turn romantic, and when the two elope three months later, Cassie agrees to let Eli support her financially. She moves into his house, begins home-schooling his two rambunctious children and befriends his nosy neighbor, Joan. But even as she settles into the rhythms of Elwood, memories of Lavender and the city still linger. So do the stressful symptoms of the O.C.D. she was diagnosed with in college: Dutiful maternal feelings for Eli’s son and daughter increasingly come with intrusive thoughts of physically attacking them.
And beneath Eli’s small-town scruffiness there is a certain sharpness, revealed in passing remarks. He ends one fight by telling Cassie, “You’re lucky you’re pretty”; when the local bookshop offers her part-time work, his response is, “I’d miss you on the weekends.” (Even his marriage proposal comes with commentary on that; after she says yes, he adds, “Now you won’t have to get a job.”)
Eli’s subtle capacity for manipulation seems, from the start, linked to the uncertain events surrounding Beth’s death: He seldom speaks about her, and seems to do so only when he wants Cassie to agree to something out of sympathy, like meeting his kids for the first time on Christmas Day.
It is telling — and perhaps a gesture of solidarity — that when the ghost of Beth chooses to reveal itself, it is not to Eli but to Cassie, who gradually allows Beth to take over her mind and body. In one creepy, carnal instance of possession, Cassie looks in the mirror and sees Beth undressing. Later, she lets Beth seduce her, taking control of her fingertips and exploring her body. (“My hands felt liquid over my own skin. Then I felt a movement that wasn’t mine, a shift in my hips, then a twitch in my thumb. … I could feel her breath deepening in my chest.”)
Narrated in a casual, conversational tone, “House of Beth” grounds the paranormal activity at its core in familiar tropes and archetypes. As a result, many of the revelations in the book feel inevitable and unsurprising. Nonetheless, Cullen is a sensitive observer of the slow diminuendos that precede utter mayhem: the waning of romantic attraction, the withering of personal autonomy, the way small-town charm wears off. What’s fantastical in the novel, ultimately, is not only the ghost that shakes the bride out of her domestic bliss, but the illusion of that bliss itself.
HOUSE OF BETH | By Kerry Cullen | Simon & Schuster | 240 pp. | $26.99
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