The September House

Audiobook

Carissa Orlando

This gripping, darkly funny haunted house story — with family at its heart — starts out at almost a full tilt and never lets up.

In the prologue, we meet a couple — Margaret and Hal — who have just found their dream home. In the second act of life, they’ve just sent their daughter to college. Looking around a beautiful old Victorian that needs a little bit of work, they realize they’re falling in love with it. And then on page two:

‘I am legally obligated to disclose to you that there was a death in this house,’ the agent said, still catching her breath as she caught up to us on the third floor but not so out of sorts as to accidentally use the word ‘murder.’

And a couple of lines later, our narrator Margaret says this:

‘A house this old, you would almost expect something like that,’ I said, not even listening to my own words as I peered inside the closet. The closet!

Two pages later, Margaret and Hal have moved into the house. Their current status?

The walls of the house were bleeding again.

It turns out that the house has a schedule: While it is, indeed, haunted all year ‘round, September is a special time. Every September, the blood starts; the moaning starts; and by month’s end, there’s full-on screaming. It’s hard to get a good night’s sleep in September.

But Margaret handles it with the practical stubbornness of someone who has decided this is fine. She negotiates with the ghosts who are fully members of the household. There’s Fredericka, an axe-wounded housekeeper who pours tea and occasionally stress-stacks furniture. There’s a little boy who likes to bite. Margaret describes dodging his fangs to get her toast like it’s just one more household nuisance. A leaky sink. Ants. Murdererous little boy. There are others. Margaret calls them ‘pranksters.’

From the beginning, as a reader, you are aware that Margaret might be the strangest thing in this very strange house. She’s laser-focused on daily routines and refuses to panic. Her husband Hal is missing — he left, won’t pick up his phone — and Margaret’s main concern is keeping the stairs dry. Her grown daughter, Katherine, is texting questions that Margaret is not answering. It’s funny and unnerving at the same time.

Before chapter one ends, we’re told two other bits. First: Something awful lives in the basement, and the door is boarded over. Second: The adult daughter Katherine is coming whether Margaret wants her to or not, which means the family version of events — the story Margaret tells herself about this house — can’t hold forever.

As a reader, you might wonder, How’s the author going to keep this up? Then the book takes a turn into the why of it all: what families hide, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive, particularly in bad times.

There’s mental illness in the mix, and denial, and love that looks, at least from the outside, like madness. It’s sometimes gleefully gross. But the heart of it turns, and it’s suddently a book about a mother and a daughter and the long shadow cast by the things that can’t be said aloud. And then boom! the book whips around again and lands a finale that is gruesome and satisfying.

If you like humor in your horror — the kind of domestic comedy that happens when your walls are bleeding and you still have to make breakfast. If you want a haunted house that is clearly haunted, with rules and consequences and a basement door you absolutely should not open. If you want a heroine who refuses to leave because the porch is perfect and the mortgage is paid and love sometimes looks like staying, this is the book for you.

And if you’re an audiobook fan, you will love it even more. The narrator Kimberly Farr does a great job; she’s got the dry, motherly deadpan down, equally practical and unhinged.

The walls of the house were bleeding again.

This sort of thing could be expected; it was, after all, September.

The bleeding wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been accompanied by nightly moaning that escalated into screaming by the end of the month like clockwork. The moaning started around midnight and didn’t let up until nearly six in the morning, which made it challenging to get a good night’s sleep. Since it was early in the month, I could still sleep through the racket, but the sleep was disjointed and not particularly restful. — Carissa Orlando

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