1:38 AM is very late for me. I’m a landscaper, so I tend to wake up around 6 AM, willingly or not. And I shouldn’t be reading new books anyway – I haven’t even finished the 10 book reviews I owe Cannonball in the next 10 days.
But I read the plot description of The September House by Carissa Orlando last night and couldn’t say no. The website “Vulture” releases their “Best of 2023” lists this time of year, and for some reason the book picks were stacked with a lot of poetry and memoirs, neither of which are my cup of tea. But a horror-thriller just before the holiday season? Pour that straight into my veins.
A quick publisher’s description: “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.”
I absolutely recommend this book, with the caveat that it does contain many descriptions of domestic abuse and the horrors (literal and sometimes not) that come with it. Layering that history with a haunted house setting was inspired. As people keep telling Margaret, “nobody deserves to live like this”, but isn’t that easier said than done? Especially when the house only has blood running down the walls for ONE month of the year.
I’m a little sleep deprived, so apologies if this review doesn’t make a lot of sense. The September House is a book that it’s best to go into blind. Just know that the many ghosts were both sad and terrifying, and the living were complicated characters that I rooted for (even though they made the classic horror movie mistake of going into the dark basement). Carissa Orlando has managed to tie together the unwieldy combination of ghosts; metaphors; histories of illness and disease; and the examination of “choice” into a twisty novel that I know won’t let me go for a long time.
Happy holidays, and may we all someday find a ghost as helpful as Fredricka.