The September House

Margaret lives in a big Victorian on Hawthorn Street, and she loves it. The price was strangely low, and she has no plans to leave, whatever it gets up to. Every September it gets up to plenty: blood seeps from the walls, the ghosts of earlier residents drift through the halls, and every one of them is afraid of whatever waits in the basement.

Margaret has built a routine for coping with all this. Her husband Hal could not do the same, and one day he vanished.

Now their estranged daughter Katherine turns up to look for her father. She knows nothing about the hauntings, and she arrives just as September begins. The house has secrets it means to protect, so each step Katherine takes toward Hal brings worse trouble from the walls around her.

This is a haunted-house novel with a mystery at its centre: what happened to Hal. Margaret narrates, and she cannot be fully trusted, which keeps the reader guessing about what she says and what she leaves out. The tone is darkly funny and deeply unsettling at once, with the humour coming from how calmly Margaret treats the bleeding walls and the dead in her hallway.