Monthly Archives: October 2025

A Surreal Estate Book Tag!

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Though we’ve still got more or less a full week left in October, the next time I post will technically be November 1st (assuming I finish another book by then). Since this will be our last spooky post in the lead up to Halloween — any other spooky posts will from here on out will just be AFTER Halloween lol — I believe I owe anyone who has been following along a haunted house book tag.

Back in 2021, I was mildly obsessed with a show called Surreal Estate, in which a real estate agent specializes in selling haunted houses, and often must appease whatever supernatural entity is haunting the place before he can make the sale (John Wiswell’s Open House on Haunted Hill feels related and came out around the same time).

I was pretty much devastated because I thought the show had been cancelled, but when I was starting to google and pull together some ideas for this post, I realized it actually got renewed, and there are a total of three seasons(!) so far, with no news yet on whether or not there will be a season four.

There simply wasn’t enough time to do a re-watch of season one, and watch seasons two and three (and I’d have to get Hulu or Disney+), and come up with fun and interesting quotes myself. Also, I think that may have been quite a long post.

So I took to the internet, and found a great website which had tons of quotes from every episode . . . which was taken down sometime between the first week of September and now.

All of that to say, everything about my relationship with this poor show seems to be doomed from the start and I only managed to get a few quotes so this will be a relatively short (5 questions) list of recommendations.

I’ve mostly made it to amuse myself but would of course love it if you answered the questions yourself on your own blog and linked back to me. Or even just dropping into the comments with a couple Haunted House recs would be excellent. Perhaps I can revisit this after rewatching the series, once I’ve added a few more books to my haunted house resume.

So, without further ado, I present the SurrealEstate book tag!

“And one last thing. Don’t rule out the rational explanation. Ever.”

From Season 1 Episode 1

A haunted house book that just won’t quite suspend your disbelief. In which a logical, empirical explanation is as likely as anything supernatural . . . but still just as creepy.

The Grownup by Gillian Flynn

This one should feel familiar to any who have been reading along this month. It’s how we kicked off October this year. I enjoyed this short (short!) book for several reasons, the first being Flynn’s ability to hook the reader with an unexpected opening line, and continuous little subversions of our expectations throughout.

However, it’s not a book that leans heavily into the supernatural, if anything the opposite. The main character’s positioning as a fraud and grifter makes us doubt from the very beginning, and by the time we get to the end, it certainly feels like there’s a reasonable explanation for everything that occurred.

However I’ll let you decide when you read it. Give The Grownup by Gillian Flynn a read!

“No, it’s just sometimes these properties can act a little differently when your back is turned.”

From Season 1 Episode 2

A haunted house book with a twist. This is an old and well mined genre of horror. Which book surprised you by still having a few tricks up its sleeve?

Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey

This book could probably could have taken the spot for the last question too, though I think there actually is a supernatural element to this one, it’s only that the non-supernatural elements are also horrifying in their own right.

With Just Like Home, Gailey shows they can really write in whatever genre they want, and still have something unique and interesting to say. This book in particular seemed to give me the impression that there is still plenty more to be mined from this beloved genre!

“You must be careful. If this is what I think it is, it is old, it is cunning. It also has an ego and is easily distracted. But remember it only exists to inflict pain and sorrow. And it sees you coming.”

From Season 1 Episode 2

An irrefutable classic. The older the better. A book which is like homework for the genre. A must read, otherwise you just don’t get it.

(Side note: I usually ignore recs of this type because . . . well lets just say I have a less than favorable relationship with ‘The Classics’)

The Haunting of Hillhouse by Shirley Jackson

There’s a way in which it feels like all roads lead back to The Haunting of Hillhouse. Stephen King has reviewed it as one of the finest horror novels of the late 20th century, and the Writing Excuses Podcast did an entire episode just on the first few sentences. THoHH is such a staple of the genre, that books like the aforementioned The Grownup reference this classic in order to give themselves more clout in the genre.

I can hardly imagine a book with a bigger ego.

Ironically, I didn’t care for this one much. I’ll agree that the prose in the beginning are indeed some of the most fluid and poetic writing I’ve ever read. However, there are so many equally clunky and uninspired lines throughout the rest that it almost feels as if the gorgeous opening was some kind of fluke. In any case, at least for me, I could not tell why this book is such a staple of the Haunted House genre. I guess I’ll have to finish Stephen King’s full review . . .

“I have a story that needs to flow out of me. And that cannot happen unless the environment I am in lets that flow remain uninterrupted.”

From Season 1 Episode 3

A story you just couldn’t put down. A book which you couldn’t bother with real life while reading. Uninterrupted reading or GTFO!

We Used To Live Here by Marcus Kliewer

We Used To Live Here might be the scariest book I’ve read period. And Kliewer’s writing is superb. The perfect mix of need-know-what-happens and I-can’t-watch. I mention in my review his ability to write descriptions which are novel, yet completely understandable and often quite beautiful. He’s also a master of misdirection and suspense, constantly laying down little bread crumbs for the reader to follow. Some may go somewhere, others may not but they keep you eating up the story night after night (or maybe day after day since this can be a scary one to read after dark).

Definitely give this one a read!

“I lived in the past. But one can’t turn back time. And so, with that lovely melody playing in my head I said goodbye to this world. And it was only in the next that I learned the awful truth of what I’d done. That none of us who love this place or slept in its water could move on until that melody was turned back.”

From Season 1 Episode 3

A scary book featuring music.

The Fall Of The House of Usher

This one also could have gone in the classic section of this post, but I think I enjoyed it a little more than Hill House. Plus The Fall of The House of Usher has at least one element which I don’t feel like I see very often in any genre: Music!

The House of Usher’s last remaining occupant and caretaker, Roderick Usher, has become reclusive in the extreme while taking care of his sister, Madeline Usher, and music is one of the many tools Poe uses to show just how far he’s descended into madness. The narrator comments on the long and improvised dirges Roderick plays, and his obsessive practicing of mourning songs and funeral tunes, all played on the acoustic guitar.

The song we ‘hear’ (or is referenced) in The Fall of the House of Usher, is Carl Gottlieb Reißiger’s Last Waltz, but it is misattributed in the text to Carl Maria von Weber. Also the tune was written for — and probably played on — the piano during Poe’s time so it’s interesting that Roderick plays it on the guitar instead.

In T. Kingfisher’s What Moves The Dead, the Roderick character is a pianist, just one of the many ways that author seeks to ‘fix’ the original story by Poe.

Tag You’re It!

Well that’s it folks. Five spooky haunted house books you can (probably) still finish before Halloween next week. Let me know what you thought of this list. Is there any recommendations you’d have added? Have you read any of the ones I suggested?

Please let me know in the comments! And if you decide to do the tag, a link back here is always appreciated! Looking forward to talking about this one!

Until next time!

An October Treat: Christina Henry’s ‘The House that Horror Built’

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Another week in October, another spooky book reviewed on the blog. For this post, I finished Christina Henry’s The House that Horror Built.

A quick google search reveals that this author has already written a ton (19) of books, mostly in the genres of Dark Fantasy and fairy tale retellings. She’ been nominated for many Goodreads Choice awards (in the Horror Genre), and seems to have just generally been on the scene for quite some time (first published in 2010).

So, I’m a bit embarrassed to say that The House That Horror Built is my first exposure to Henry’s work, and that it wasn’t through some ‘best of’ list, or ‘must read’ promo material that I discovered the book, but by the increasingly rare yet perhaps most gratifying way to discover a book: I saw it on the shelf.

Or rather I kept seeing it on the shelf.

The bookends for the shelves at my local library are really just a bit of metal tubing, and so the cover of whichever book is on the end of the row is visible. It’s not really on display as we might think of library displays, but you’re not gonna miss it. You may not register you’re even seeing it but you are, each and every day until it’s a bit like a part of the landscape. And then one day, you wake up and decide you want to focus your reading on Haunted Houses during the month of October, and it’s the first thing that comes to mind, and it makes you wonder if you’re even in control of your life at all, or just some unwitting victim of your environment . . . or ya know, “Hey this looks good!”

And The House That Horror Built IS GOOD, with perhaps only some (IMHO) minor pacing issues towards the end. It’s not a story you’ll be afraid to read when the sun goes down — not like We Used To Live Here or even last week’s Mapping the Interior — but it is still a compelling story with interesting characters and something of a mystery to be solved by the end of the book. All this is sort of wrapped in the trappings of a haunted house story, with the added element of the main character being a horror aficionado whose job it is to clean a famous (and famously reclusive) horror director’s house filled with props and artifacts from his films.

In this way, Henry is able to pay homage to — and tap into nostalgia for — early horror films and genre staples. Interestingly, I think the inclusion of these films also manages to serve as a kind of shorthand for the author, who no longer has to spend a lot of time building suspense or backstory, but can instead reference a relevant movie or book in the genre and get the reader into the right frame of mind even sooner. Gillian Flynn’s The Grownup sort of did something similar with references to The Haunting of Hillhouse, The Woman in White etc.

Of course, no book is simply about one thing, and The House that Horror Built contains more than just spooky costumes, and the occasional twist (one near the middle I though particularly good). The book’s main character, Harry Adams, is not only a horror film aficionado, but also a single mother, and a runaway from an abusively Christian family, poor, and was at one point homeless. So lots to unpack there. And of course as she becomes more entangled in the life of the reclusive film director (Javier Castillo), there is also the complications of fame to navigate, with reporters, paparazzi harassment and stalking.

And to put a little cherry on the top, the story takes place in that sort of limbo period at the tail end of the Covid shutdown when masks and social distancing are still being strictly observed, but some things are starting to reopen. The main character’s son, Gabe, goes to school remotely some days of the week, and in-person other days. Folks are beginning to return to restaurants but not yet with enough frequency to hire a full staff.

These little details are not only some more small challenges for our hero to overcome, but I liked how their inclusion documents that period, and shines a light on the very real challenges that very real people faced during that time, without those struggles taking over the story completely. I’m not sure what the author’s intent in setting the story during that time period was, but I found it a nice addition to a story which was already doing so much so well.

My only real critique of the story, which I mentioned up above, was a bit of the pacing. Early in the book, there were many chapters with strong hooks pulling me into the next chapter, and often I’d wish for just five more minutes with the book to see what happened next (alas the irrefutable bounds of a lunch break bend for no one). However, as the we neared the end of the book, that pull did not feel as strong. Perhaps because so many more elements had been introduced, the main thrust of the story got a bit lost. When the end finally did arrive, it felt a bit abrupt. Like perhaps there should have been another chapter or something just to wrap things up. However, this might just be personal taste.

Give ‘The House that Horror Built’ a Read?

Yes! Despite a somewhat abrupt feeling to the ending, I really did enjoy this one. This author has a talent for writing interesting characters with A LOT going on in their lives and real ability for incorporating many disparate elements into the story. Before reading The House that Horror Built I would not have thought a novel about a Horror film director’s haunted mansion could also be about single-motherhood at the end of a pandemic, AND a lesson in setting a proper work-life balance with boundaries AND about so many other things.

Anyway, that’s all I have for this week! Has anyone already read this one? What was your favorite room in the house? What’s your favorite horror movie?

Please leave your thoughts in the comments! Looking forward to chatting about this one!

Outside My Normal Haunts: Exploring Rez Gothic With ‘Mapping The Interior’

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Well we’re in the second week of our spooky era here on A&A and the shivers are starting to (ahem) creep down the spine. Excellent.

I have to admit, this is not my first Stephen Graham Jones story, and actually not even the first time I’ve read Mapping the Interior. According to Goodreads, I originally read this novella back in October of 2021 but never posted a review about it. Looking back at the archive from that time, it’s not particularly hard to see why. I was BUSY.

I had finally released Narmer and The God Beast on Amazon and was trying to talk a little bit about that. I was still deep in my Hugo Era and trying to keep up with everything going on there (I posted reviews of Tracy Deon’s Legendborn, Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby, and Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer). And finally, I was trying to push out my own haunted house story for folks subscribing to my newsletter. It ended up being a kind of Steampunk version of Smarthouse which I named Boutilier House.

I’m honestly astonished I had the time to do all of that lol. In any case, I was probably reading a bunch of haunted house stories around that time, trying to get a sense of what had and hadn’t been done before in that space, not unlike the main character of Mapping the Interior, cataloguing the genre from the inside, mapping it out so that I could search it systematically, not for the ghost of my dead father, but for my muse!

Anyway, we’re here to review a novella, not get cute about marketing an old story, so lets get started with that!

Mapping the Interior feels notable for a few reasons. Similar to The Grownup, the story does not open with a description of the house, but with the main character sleep walking. We learn about the house a few pages later, and it also bucks our expectations. It’s modular. At only 1140 square feet (avg in 2025 is 2,200 square feet), it is a far cry from the mansions we’re used to reading about in early Gothic literature, or even the abandoned suburban haunts we see in more modern horror. Also, Jones is Blackfeet Native American and depicts Native American characters within the story.

All of these choices, from the size and character of the house, to the backgrounds of the people living in it, build a picture we’re not used to reading in Haunted House stories. An example of what Wikipedia describes as “. . . Native American Gothic, or Rez Gothic: a niche publishing genre characterized as using fantasy, science fiction, and horror to shed light on racial inequalities . . .” (from the wiki for Stephen Graham Jones)

Mapping the Interior is certainly not the first book to do this, not even in Stephen Graham Jones’ catalog, but it felt representative to me of the power this kind of fiction can have and an important deviation from the classic trappings of a Haunted House story.

But for all the tropes and expectations this novella subverts, it stays true to form in one major element, managing to be both deep and meaningful and a supremely unsettling read (which is what we come to horror for right!).

Part of that feeling of awe and dread the reader experiences — I feel — comes from the perspective the story is told. Our narrator, Junior, is only twelve years old at the time the main part of the story takes place, and there is a type of sureness and certainty in the supernatural that adults just don’t have any longer. And through this perspective we are made to believe what happens is real, we are made to believe in ghosts.

And we’re able to bridge the gap between our own age and a child’s because Junior is simply incredibly well written. Indigo Xix writes:

“. . . this is the kind of child I adore: he is innocent and precocious, noble and self-involved all a the same time. He is, in other words, a real human child, full of the complexities and contradictions that all children have.” – Stephen Graham Jones’s ‘Mapping the Interior – A Review

I could not agree more, or put it any better (hence the quote hahah).

Of course there is also the ghost itself, which walks a perfect tight rope between violent benevolence, and indisputable evil. Through most of the story, the reader is never quite sure just what kind of ghost this is. A helpful spirit? Or a hateful devil?

Also, incredibly (ahem) fleshed out, this ghost just feels like something Jones pulled from a Native American myth or legend. Normally, I know half the fun of a read like this would be tracking down just which legend it came from and just what connections that myth has to the larger culture. Unfortunately, I have a rather shallow knowledge of Native American mythology and am not even sure quite where to start. Even Jones himself isn’t quite sure exactly where this haunt originated from. He tells Paul Semel (of paulsemel.com) that:

“Try as I might, I can’t remember what ghost-stories I might have had in mind when I wrote this. I was watching a lot of Westerns, I recall . . .” – Exclusive Interview: Mapping The Interior Author Stephen Graham Jones

If this is the case, I am perhaps more impressed, since it means that the horrors written on the page are just whatever horrors Jones came up with himself.

Finally, we have the end, which I won’t spoil, but which I would consider a true coda (like in a musical composition). At first, it feels a bit tacked-on, but after some consideration, I feel it is actually perfect because it makes the story NOT perfect. We have a nicely finished story, and then a bit extra which just leaves us a little bit unsettled. I don’t think every story could, or should do this, but I did enjoy this technique here. It just felt right for Mapping the Interior.

Give ‘Mapping The Interior’ a Read?

Absolutely! As a quick but meaningful diversion from the ‘typical’ haunted house story, Mapping the Interior fulfills that need exceedingly well, and as an intro to Native American Gothic, or Rez Gothic, it brings you up to speed in just a short 100-ish pages. I really enjoyed reading from Junior’s perspective, and was able to appreciate just how well this kid is written that his viewpoint alone enables us to really BELIEVE in ghosts, and increasingly fear and dread them as Junior learns to do as the story progresses.

While I couldn’t pick up exactly which myth or legend our haunt comes from, I found myself more impressed as it meant that the author did not have a template from which to draw, but really had to rely on his own creativity and knowledge to keep the reader scared (which I was!). And finally, I enjoyed the ‘coda-like’ nature of the end which left us feeling as unsettled as ever despite getting the ‘good ending’.

That’s all I have for this week! Has anyone read this novella before? Or any other Stephen Graham Jones stories? Which are your favorite? Did you recognize the ghost here from a native myth or legend? Where might we start our search?

Leave your thoughts and feelings in the comments section! I’m looking forward to talking about this one!

See you next time for some more Haunted House adventures! Stay spooky everyone hahah.

More Palahniuk Than Poltergeist: A Look at Gillian Flynn’s ‘The Grownup’

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It’s October again, which means I’m officially back in my Haunted House Era until we hit November. Looking back at last October (2024), it seems we were a bit light with only my review of What Moves The Dead scratching this particular itch. Marcus Kliewer’s We Used To Live Here seems like what I should have been reading, but apparently I didn’t get around to it until November. Weird. In any case, it’s probably the last haunted house story I’ve read, and honestly my current favorite.

The plan for THIS October is to read Gillian Flynn’s The Grownup (check), and two more haunted house stories before finishing out the month with a book tag!

Will I actually manage to get all of that reading done? Will I get the reviews written? And will I have a new favorite by the end of this month? Only time will tell.

Let’s get to it!

To my knowledge, this is the first piece of fiction from Gillian Flynn that I’ve actually read. I really enjoyed HBO’s Sharp Objects (though I only got around to watching it within the last year or two), and I knew Gone Girl by reputation though I had never seen the movie or read the book (I am now about 20% through the book).

But somewhere in the back of my mind, I had remembered that Flynn had written a “fantasy story”, which was in one of the George R.R. Martin anthologies (Rogues). I was surprised and honestly kind of curious, but had yet to pursue it. This info was far from my mind when I set out to build my list for this October, but as I was scrolling through my library’s catalog, and came across The Grownup I was again surprised that Flynn had worked on something with a supernatural bent. Finally it clicked that THIS was the fantasy story from Rogues, originally titled What Do You Do?

It’s hard to discuss this short story fully without spoiling most of the twists — I’m learning that Gillian Flynn loves a good twist! — but a few things stand out about it right from the start.

The first thing is the opening. It starts: “I didn’t stop giving hand jobs because I wasn’t good at it.”

Excuse me what?

I’ll refrain from making an ex-squeeze me joke (ok I guess I still made it) but talk about an attention grabbing first line. And about setting the tone hahah. I felt this opening notable for more than just raunchy nature of its content however. First, it’s (ahem) dripping with characterization and hopelessly compelling from that lens. Who is the type of person that introduces themselves this way?

Second, it sets The Grownups apart from other haunted house stories, in that it doesn’t begin with describing THE HOUSE. Perhaps the prime example of what I’m talking about is the quintessential Sherley Jackson classic The Haunting of Hillhouse which manages to give the reader a sense of unease and dread about Hillhouse within the first paragraph.

The Grownups doesn’t bother, it positions its narrator as its most interesting character, gives us her story right away, and then finally talks about the house somewhere around the halfway-point (pg 28 of only 62). In this way, it almost reads more like a Chuck Palahniuk novel than a true horror story (now I want to re-read Haunted). It’s hard to think of this choice as anything but deliberate, especially since Flynn’s narrator — something of a bookworm despite her profession — mentions Haunting of Hillhouse as a favorite read of one of her Johns.

In any case, when the house finally does get introduced, it is sufficiently creepy from the outside, and even more horrific once we meet the people living there. I sort of have to stop here as we begin getting into spoiler territory but just know that once we finally get to Carterhook Manor, the twists start coming and Flynn does a wonderful job destabilizing the story, giving us the illusion of knowing what’s going on and then finding out, time after time, we actually had no idea.

I will admit, my only complaint about the book, is that Flynn does not spend much time attempting to ‘scare’ the reader. It’s just not that type of story. So while I did enjoy this one a lot, I’m not really sure it quite hit the threshold of the ‘spooky’ vibe I was aiming for with my selection this month.

So, Give “The Grownup” a Read?

I liked this one. Flynn knows her craft well, and is able to hook the reader with something unexpected from literally the first sentence of this story. And because I’m a nerd, I enjoyed how this book situates itself within the genre, or I guess how it kind of removes itself from the genre while still managing to incorporate some of its sign posts.

All of that meta commentary happening with mentions of The Haunting of Hillhouse, and Dracula; Rebecca and The Woman In White (I still need to read those last two classics), make it extra fascinating that the story was originally published in what is ostensibly a fantasy anthology (GRRM’s Rogues).

Also, it’s a short one, so there’s little downside here that I can see except that it’s generally not really a spooky book in the way we want in the lead up to Halloween.

That’s all I have for this week! Has anyone read this one before? What parts were your favorite? Would you try ‘cleanse’ Carterhook Manor. By what point would you have nope’d out of there?

That’s all I have for this week! See you next time!