This book is pitched as a millennial horror story about today’s bankrupt rental landscape. And I could definitely relate to much of the shit landlord and substandard housing chat in this book; at times, it was almost triggering to read!
At the same time, I think this is also book about a relationship in stasis and decline, about being young and trying to figure out who you are, about urban living where you’re pushed to the edges of domesticity. Am I doing this right? Is this what it feels like to be “home”? To be happy?
The precarious living conditions feel part of that overall destabilising fog, and I enjoyed the metaphor of the flat’s escalating menace as the repressed feelings and fears start to unravel. Mould, cold air, feelings of unease, and strange sounds all coalesce in an eerie urban psychodrama.
It’s left a little ambiguous as to the exact nature of the haunting and horror, but I liked the slight vagueness. Was it psychosomatic, was it imagined? How was the haunting connected to the people upstairs or the shrivelling relationship?
It reminds me of the Freudian concept on unheimlich (the uncanny), which means “not from home”: what makes things scary is their proximity to us, their recognisability.
An accomplished debut novel. Read if you want to dwell on domesticity, being young, or just fancy a bit of creepy urban horror with a twist.
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