The September House
Margaret loves her house—a grand, improbably cheap Victorian on Hawthorn Street—and she is not leaving it, no matter what it does. And every September, it does a great deal: the walls weep blood, the ghosts of former residents wander the halls, and all of them are terrified of whatever lives in the basement. Margaret has learned to cope. Her husband Hal could not, and one day he simply disappeared.
When their estranged daughter Katherine arrives to search for her missing father—knowing nothing of the hauntings—the timing could not be worse: September has just begun, and every step toward finding Hal makes the house's horrors worse, because there are secrets it needs to keep. Carissa Orlando's The September House is a haunted-house novel with a darkly funny, deeply unsettling unreliable narrator, and a mystery about what really happened to Hal.
Margaret's husband who can no longer tolerate the hauntings and abruptly leaves, prompting his daughter to search for him.
The September House is a horror novel. It features a haunted house with escalating supernatural occurrences.
Carissa Orlando holds a doctorate in clinical-community psychology, and she intentionally integrated her expertise in mental health and trauma into the narrative to explore how the protagonist processes her environment and personal history.
The novel is a standalone work that concludes its primary narrative arc within a single volume.