A Woman Is A House

My house is where I can be my most insane. I create a thin veneer of normality while at work, while on dates, while writing this in a busy cafe, but once enclosed in my drafty root cellar of a home, I can indulge in peeling off the skin of Hot Normal Bartender and letting my loose wet bones breathe. My house was built in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco fire. It was constructed in the wake of tragedy and made to withstand fires and fog and floods and dumb 25 year olds who leave candles burning. I live with my best friend and my cat and her dog and the ants that crawl from the cracks in the walls and my house is where I paint and write and cry and sleep and it is a place I’ve never felt safer. My house is not a horror house.

But women and houses and horror have an undeniable relationship. When Daphne du Maurier wrote Rebecca in 1938 and when Sarah Gailey wrote Just Like Home in 2022, they both depicted the home as a living, breathing being that is inextricably intertwined with the history and trauma it holds. 

Rebecca  is not a ghost story. It’s not even really a story about a haunted house, but the house plays such a pivotal role that it was the first I thought of when deciding to write about houses in horror novels. The first sentence of the novel is one of the most well-known first sentences in horror history:

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

 The main character (who goes unnamed the entire book – it doesn’t go unnoticed that the house has more of a definitive role than the narrator) goes from having no home to speak of to living in the aforementioned Manderley, an enormous manor with a sexy mysterious older man whose previous wife disappeared (red flag!). Though the previous wife, Rebecca, is gone, the house clings onto the memories and so do the staff. The narrator is unable to escape the memories the house holds: lipstick on a handkerchief, Rebecca’s handwriting in a book, the smell of azaleas in the hallways. Throughout the book, the narrator becomes more comfortable in Manderley, but it never quite accepts her. In the end, (spoiler alert even though it was written over eight decades ago) the house burns. In honeyed words, du Maurier describes how the house “was a sepulcher, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins.” The only real way for the house to release its hold on its inhabitants was for it to be razed, and even then it remains in the narrator’s dreams.

Sarah Gailey’s Just Like Home is another story about a house that clings to memories. While Rebecca’s eeriness comes from not knowing the intentions behind anyone, including the house, Gailey’s novel is rife with terrifying hauntings: a bed moving of its own accord, legs being grabbed in the night, mysterious notes from the past, and a parasitic artist literally removing chunks of the home for his own uses. The first sentence of this book reveals the complicated emotions about the house in the same way that Rebecca’s does:

“The Crowder House clung to the soil the way damp air clings to hot skin.”

The narrator, Vera, returns to her childhood home (also named, like Manderley) after escaping it years prior. Slowly it’s revealed that Vera’s father was a prolific serial killer who, while building the house from scratch, included a soundproofed room where he would kill men. Neither Manderley nor Crowder House are impartial;  both are anthropomorphized and affect the plot and characters.

Written in 1938, Rebecca is much more chaste than Just Like Home. The sensuality and history that Vera has with the house itself is one of the most jarring parts of this novel. The house does more than hold memories, it holds Vera herself and allowed her to survive the formative years that were so destructive toward her. While horrific things happened in Crowder House, the love it was built with shielded Vera from the worst of it. Similarly, du Maurier writes, “This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.” The houses are not passive bystanders but fully fleshed characters.

Horror is more than ghosts and murders. Horror, especially women’s horror, explores how we relate to and even love the parts of life we are forced to endure. Houses are historically the women’s domain and we write what we know. The pain and suffering that happens in a home does not happen in a vacuum; rather, those parts help to shine a light on the protective qualities that the four walls provide.

RATINGS

Rebecca:4.5/5

Just Like Home: 3/5