The September House: Horror Thoughts

Sometimes things surprise us...

The September House starts when Margaret and her husband, Hal, buy their dream house: a secluded Victorian estate complete with original hardwood floors, a turret, and a ghost or twenty.

Within the first few pages we learn the full extent of the house’s hostility: ghost children bite and point menacingly, the walls literally bleed, birds commit suicide by flying into the house on a daily basis, and something unspeakably terrible lurks in the basement.

All this would scare most new home owners away, but not Margaret. This is her house, and she is determined to stay in it no matter how bad it gets. And we soon learn that Margaret has experience making the best of bad situations. In fact, she might not be the most reliable narrator after all.

After surviving four years in the house, things come to a head when Hal finally has enough and leaves, disappearing into thin air, and their daughter, Katherine, insists on searching for him. Which means she’ll be in The House in September. And things are always worse in September…

Spoiler-free thoughts

I LOVED this book. I was hooked from the very first page. It’s not very often that reading gives me the same feeling of exhilaration that it gave me when I was a kid, but this book did just that.

This book is smart. It includes basically all of the classic haunted house story tropes but presents them in such a fresh and intriguing way. What if instead of fleeing or trying to get rid of the ghosts you just… found a way to live with them?

A lot of Goodreads reviewers didn’t like the tone, as they felt it came off as too humorous. I didn’t feel that way at all. It is quietly absurd in places (how can it not be when you’re talking about trying to walk through the river of blood in your hallway without getting your socks dirty?), but it’s always played straight. It worked for me.

Spiritually, this book reminded me a lot of Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street. Both have narrators that you know are unreliable, you’re just not sure how.

For example, you get the feeling that something is not right between Margaret, Hal, and their daughter. Why else has Katherine never visited the house? Not that Margaret ever talks about this directly - in her worldview, everything is hunky-dory.

That’s all to say that this book has a lot of layers. If you liked The Last House on Needless Street, you’ll probably enjoy this one, too.

Heads up: this book deals with domestic violence. In fact, it’s all just a big allegory for abuse. While the physical abuse is never described graphically, the injuries from the abuse are. The most insidious part, however, is how Margaret has learned to mentally contort herself in order to live with it. It comes across as both heartbreaking and all too real.

SPOILER thoughts

Heads up: we’ve entered the spoiler section of the review. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend leaving now and coming back after you’ve read The September House.

Ah! Isn't this book SO GOOD?

I love how we’re clued into something not being quite right from almost the first few pages. Orlando masterfully writes from the point of view of a woman who has deluded herself into thinking that life is good, even when the any sane person sees that it’s not.

It’s like she doesn’t even think about any of the bad stuff unless she’s forced to, so much that she doesn’t even mention any of it. A classic coping mechanism for anyone living in an abusive situation.

So we know that she’s somehow unreliable as a narrator - but how unreliable? Throughout the book I was afraid that we’d eventually find out that Margaret was seeing things and that none of the entities in the house were real. This is the laziest kind of twist, in my opinion.

Luckily, that’s not what we got - though I had my doubts in the scene just before the climax where Margaret is being interviewed by the police. I’d caught on that there was something up with Edie when Katherine came home and didn’t acknowledge her at all.

The parallel between the abuse Hal inflicts on Margaret and the horrors of the house is pretty heavy-handed, though intentionally so, right down to “Hal” rhyming with “Vale.” It didn’t bother me.

I can see that some people might roll their eyes at the ending. All they had to do to defeat Master Vale was… work together? But I’m a fan of abusers getting their comeuppance and the catharsis of it was enough to make me overlook it. Plus this book had enough goodwill built up to make up for it.

My favorite character in the book is Fredricka, the helpful ghost maid. I smiled at all her interactions with Margaret and how kind she could be, and my heart did a little leap when she instigated the final show-down with Master Vale.

And did anyone else picture the maid from the first season of American Horror Story?

Did anyone else pick up on the fact that all the “abusers” in the book - Hal, Jasper, the unsympathetic police officers - were killed like “dead spiders?” I’m wondering if this was intentional or just a happy little accident.