A home is often thought of as a place of refuge; somewhere that a person can feel safe, accepted, and that they have a deep emotional connection to beyond the material objects that fill it. Readers of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror especially know that a house is a different beast entirely. A house can be a magical place that exists beyond time and space. A house can run around on chicken legs or float through outer space. Often—especially in the genres I’ve mentioned—a house will turn on its occupants and drive them mad or be a deeply malevolent entity unto itself.
To encourage everyone to read more books with weird houses in it I have compiled a list of comics and novels to get you started.
The Me You Love in the Dark by Skottie Young and Jorge Corona
It feels like only a matter of time until A24 discovers Skottie Young and Jorge Corona’s brilliant modern take on gothic haunted house stories. If you haven’t already stumbled across The Me You Love in the Dark then I insist that you stop reading this and go get your hands on a copy right now. It’s hands-down one of my favorite comic books that I’ve read in a long time and one that I find myself still thinking about.
This delightfully spooky tale of love, obsession, and art begins when a young artist leaves the big city behind and moves into an allegedly haunted house located at the edge of a small town. That it is haunted makes no nevermind to Ro who is hoping to find some inspiration in its dark and dusty halls. What Ro finds instead is a creature somewhere between a ghost and an eldritch monster that is as desperate for companionship as she is. Their tentative friendship turns romantic and then quickly toxic when the creature’s attempts to keep Ro inside turn violent.
Beyond being a clever take on haunted houses, The Me You Love in the Dark is an excellent meditation on art, artists, and how a person’s craft can become all-consuming.
Gallant by V.E. Schwab
What’s better than a gorgeous, crumbling manor house with poorly lit hallways that are being haunted by half-formed ghosts? Two stunningly gorgeous, crumbling manor houses that perfectly mirror one another but exist in different planes of existence of course. This is exactly what Olivia Prior discovers during V.E. Schwab’s chest-achingly good YA novel, Gallant.
After growing up in the Merilance School for Girls, a desolate and unfriendly place, a letter arrives for Olivia inviting her to a home that she knows very little about – Gallant. Determined to discover what secrets her ancestral home, its half-formed ghouls, and her volatile cousin are keeping from her, Olivia accidentally discovers the door to a world that perfectly mirrors the one she already exists in. Within this world is a Gallant that exists like a photonegative of her home. It’s ostensibly the same but is ruled over by a mysterious and shadowy figure who wants her dead.
True to Schwab’s form, Gallant is a book that will leave you feeling like you have a massive hole in your heart which is just about the highest praise that a bookseller can bestow unto a book.
The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
If you’re in the mood to read a deeply unsettling murder mystery that has a sinister, time traveling house at the center of its story then The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes is the perfect book for you. I have yet to find another that kept me awake at night the way The Shining Girls did, which is both a blessing and a curse.
The Shining Girls (a title that is, no doubt, a nod to Stephen King) kicks off in depression-era Chicago when Harper Curtis discovers a strange and alluring house that allows him to travel to different periods of time. Harper’s unbelievable discovery comes at a steep price. The house, through malevolent means, begins to show him the girls that he has yet to kill throughout time and consequently allows him to slip in and out of different time periods to spy on, talk to, and eventually murder his victims. He’s brutal, efficient, and impossible to track down until he finally meets his match in 1989. By some miracle Kirby Mazrachi survives Harper’s attack and begins to unravel the mystery of how Harper can do what he can.
Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey
The first word that comes to mind while thinking about Sarah Gailey’s claustrophobic and utterly riveting new novel, Just Like Home, is “gloopy”. It’s a story that, if you couldn’t tell from its fabulous cover, oozes strangeness and terror from start to finish and at its core is a truly horrific house.
Vera Crowder has made several bad decisions over the course of her life but the worst by far is returning to her childhood home. Upon arrival Vera discovers that her emotionally manipulative mother is a shell of her former self and seems to subsist on sickly sweet lemonade alone (good luck drinking any once you’re done reading this book). As if her dying mother isn’t enough to deal with, there’s the small matter of the parasitic artist who has taken up residence in the Crowder guest house and is capitalizing on Vera’s violent past by stripping her home of anything and everything that isn’t nailed down.
Just Like Home takes a turn for the truly unnerving when shadows start to move on their own accord, gouges appear in the walls, and notes written in Vera’s father’s handwriting begin to appear. Is Vera’s father back from the dead? Is her mind failing her? Or is there something infinitely more sinister afoot?
Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes
Traditionally a haunted house can be defined as a structure of some kind that is occupied by malevolent, disembodied spirits that drive said structure’s living residents to a point of madness (or worse). What makes S.A. Barnes’s horror novel, Dead Silence, so much fun is the fact that she takes the concept of a haunted house and drops it in the middle of outer space.
Twenty years ago the Aurora, a luxury space cruiser (think the Titanic) mysteriously vanished on its maiden voyage of the solar system. The ship and its hundreds of passengers disappeared without a trace. Naturally the Aurora is the last thing that Claire Kovalik and her ragtag salvage crew expect to find after picking up an emergency signal deep in outer space. A salvage job like this could change their lives forever but once aboard the Aurora it becomes clear that something went terribly wrong all those years ago. There are dead bodies everywhere, frozen in time, and evidence that the passengers turned on each other. Words are scrawled in blood on the walls, and Claire and her crew experience vivid and violent hallucinations. Soon what began as a potentially lucrative endeavor turns into a grisly, claustrophobic fight for their lives.
If you’re looking for a book that is full of unspeakable horrors that will keep you up at night then Dead Silence is exactly what you’re looking for.
Rachael Conrad is the Event Coordinator, Social Media Manager, and a Frontline Bookseller for Print: A Bookstore in Portland, Maine. She was a 2021 Publisher’s Weekly Star Watch nominee for her bookselling. You can find her tweeting about beautiful people and the books that she’s reading @Rachael_Conrad.
I expected Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always to be part of this list so since it isn’t I thought I should mention it here.
Gormenghast is a classic weird house (although the weirdness may be as much the people as the house).
Not as old but not recent: James Stoddard’s The High House and its sequels.
J.G. Ballard’s story “The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista” certainly has a weird house at its centre.
Virginia Woolf’s short story “A Haunted House”: in only two pages she effectively creates and then subverts a haunted house and its residents. And William Hope Hodgson’s “The House On The Borderland”, in which the events and settings become increasingly detached from reality except for the house itself, which is a constant element as the narrator hurtles through eons into the future.
This is one idea I’ve tossed around in my mind from time to time. My version involves two would-be burglers who break into what they believe to be an abandoned mansion in their neighborhood. There are many tales and urban legends about the estate that speak of the former owner, now deceased. The two young men have also heard rumors of hidden cash, valuable antiques, and other valuables that appear to be easy pickings considering that the house has no alarm system or other defensive features. They gain entry into the dilapidated structure after several failed attempts and are surprised to find that at least some of the stories are true. There is plunder aplenty just laying around and so they begin to fill their sacks. One particularly inviting cabinet is filled with liquor of every description. Since they haven’t been challenged or discovered they decide to pause long enough to imbibe from one of the bottles. Shortly thereafter the lights go out and they become unconscious. When they come to they find themselves shackled to a wall in the basement. Stripped of all their clothes and unable to be heard by shouting and yelling until they are hoarse, their host appears in the form of a shriveled old man in a lab coat. What ensues from there, remains as yet, unwritten.
Not horrifying, but weird and fascinating: The High House, by James Stoddard. The house has long hallways, some carpeted and some crumbling. There are odd kingdoms and hidden staircases. There’s a dinosaur in the attic. And there is a threat to the house and its inhabitants that Carter, the heir to the missing Master of the House, needs to address.
I preferred The Ghost Line to Dead Space. They have almost identical premises, although one is a mystery, and the other horror. I thought that Dead Space relied a bit too much on having an unreliable narrator. The Ghost Line is much more straightforward, although its weirdness is weirder until you understand what’s behind it all.
Absolutely think this list needs Peter Cline’s 14. It’s incredible! Solving the mystery of the house is the entire, compelling story.
The description of Dead Space reminds of Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Diving into the Wreck and sequels – another seriously creepy entry in the mini subgenre of haunted derelict spaceships.
Mark Z. Danielewski‘s House of Leaves definitely fits here, being a strange book about a strange book about a strange film about a strange house in which hallways seem to appear in between rooms, and which sort of is the book itself…
An obvious mention is Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. But a very odd house is featured in David Lindsay’s 1922 novel The Haunted Woman. The title is quite misleading. When the main male and female characters, who hadn’t met before, visit the house and go upstairs they become mentally enlightened and liberated, and fall in love. But when they come downstairs they don’t remember anything at all about upstairs and they are again virtually strangers to each other. Until …
Funny thing. For the longest time, I thought the William Castle classic House on Haunted Hill was a very loose adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House. They do have broadly similar plots in which an eccentric invites several people to stay at a reputed haunted house, including a high-strung young woman and a smug jerkwad. However, both came out in 1959, with House on Haunted Hill being released in February. Even if Haunting of Hill House came out in January, Castle would have had to work with Corman-like efficiency to get it done that quickly.
@13/sitting_duck That’s not quite right. Yes, Castle’s film came out in February 1959. Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House was published in October 1959. The film based on Jackson’s book, simply titled The Haunting, came out in August 1963.
@13 sitting_duck Sorry, I misunderstood the point you were making i.e. knowing that Castle’s film and Jackson’s book both came out in 1959, you had, for a while,thought that Castle had based his film on Jackson’s book, until you learned that Castle’s film was released in February. I mis-interpreted what you wrote as thinking that the film that was based on the book came out in January 1959. Mea culpa.
The Talisman jumps into my mind for a fine weird-house story. It would be a “best weird house in a supporting role” nomination, however – not a leading role.
The Gray House, by Mariam Petrosyan, is an incredible story of a house/boarding school for disabled children. Because their prospects in the world beyond the house seem nil, graduation looks like death to them. There is, however, another world accessible through the house, a hardscrabble world, but one where their physical disabilities are reversed and with other strange properties of its own; this makes for a difficult choice of world as they approach graduation. This is not a book with a lot of action (although people die violently). It’s mostly a character study, and the characters are wonderful. All the residents (including staff) are known only by nicknames, and there are two different timelines interwoven, between which many of the characters change nicknames, so part of the puzzle and joy of this book is picking up the clues of who is who in order to recognize the character development.