I can’t quite pinpoint which accursed home was the first to fascinate me. As a child in the 1980s, I read a lot of Edgar Allan Poe, so it may have been the Ushers and their titular falling house. Or the culprit could be the terrors of Amityville, which I encountered on my mother’s night stand. But whatever the initial seed, from an early age, I was hooked.
I thought about this recently as I walked up the front steps of the house used for exteriors in the film adaptation of “The Exorcist.” It was a pleasant day; the house seemed delightful. It was difficult to imagine that it had once been chosen as the backdrop for horrific events.
But then, that is the appeal of these tales. The home is supposed to be a cozy, safe space — and when that sanctuary is breached, that’s when the screaming starts. Haunted house stories often involve family secrets and domestic terrors. Sometimes they make us question the reliability of the narrator, as in Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” or they openly accept the existence of the supernatural, like in the “The Exorcist.” Sometimes the evil we perceive in a house can be explained rationally, although this does not necessarily make it any less horrifying. (See: Bertha locked away in an attic in “Jane Eyre.”)
Here are a few of my favorite books that prove that home is where the darkness dwells.
The Elementals
by Michael McDowell
In McDowell’s 1981 novel, instead of a single house with issues, we get three, all located on a remote spit of land in the Alabama panhandle. Two of these houses are occupied, while the third has been abandoned for years. Unlike the other homes on this list, the houses in “The Elementals” have not been the site of prolonged hauntings; in fact, the families that own them journey there to enjoy themselves each summer. But something has changed this year, and an unseen, malevolent presence begins to menace the vacationers. “The Elementals” brims with a sense of the uncanny and remains one of the creepiest horror books I’ve read.
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