A House With Good Bones. T. Kingfisher. 2023.
I’ve written a lot in this space about the house in horror fiction - mostly in film, but literature is where it started. This book is a haunted house story, of sorts, and it provides a nice way to talk about something I’ve been thinking a lot about - how to think about horror that is thinking about itself as horror. What do you do once everybody who writes horror fiction and makes horror cinema has already read Men, Women, and Chainsaws? What do you do when you can assume your audience has read it, that they’ve already read a dozen haunted house stories and they know the form and they know what to expect and they know what the metaphors all mean?
Because the house, in horror fiction, is usually a stand-in for the family. It’s the enclosure, the privacy, and the false safety of the family made physical. There’s a reason so many gothic novels, whether the classics or pulp, have featured incest plots taking place within spooky old mansions: it’s because the suffocating, overpowering nature of the house is a metaphor for the suffocating, too-close nature of family relationships. The home, like the family, is something that’s supposed to be safe but isn’t. It is supposed to be loving but is terrifying and hateful. The home is supposed to encircle us in safety but instead traps us in and with danger. This is not a controversial point. When you’re reading - or watching - a haunted house story, you can usually expect dark family histories, personal trauma, and toxic, boundary-free relationships.
And we all know this now, so I think regular haunted house stories are harder to write. You have a few options, as I see it. You can up the ante, multiplying the gore or the darkness or the shocking twists far beyond what anyone else has done. This is hard to pull off; so much has already been done that horror fans can be hard to shock. Oh, the brother and sister are sleeping together? That happens in every gothic novel, big deal. Oh, they’re a family of cannibals? Who isn’t? Oh, they kidnap and sacrifice children? I think I’ve read that one already. Et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum.
Of course, even if you do manage to push the boundaries of taste enough to surprise people, that won’t be enough to make your story good. There’s more to horror than simple disgust. So you can forget about what people already know and lean into technique. This is the hardest option, but probably the best one.
The third option, one that seems increasingly popular and is also used in this novel, is to just dispense with the metaphor entirely and make your plot directly about family trauma, so directly that the characters comment on it. A House with Good Bones is about how child abuse creates literal monsters and you battle them by accepting that the trauma helped make you who you are. That’s pretty much it.
And you know, it’s fine. This book really is pretty good; the main character is appealing enough, the suspense is suspenseful. But I keep thinking of what I wrote about the YA-ification of genre fiction when I covered Robin McKinley. Kingfisher’s book isn’t YA, though she has written books for kids. But it is YA-esque, in that the characters helpfully spell out for you what the lesson is and then they learn it. I don’t really want horror to leave me with a nice, resolved feeling - shit should remain fucked up, if it’s horror. Maybe people learn lessons, maybe they get away, but part of what makes horror horror is that tension never really dissipates. This book was just too god damn nice for me.