Grab the Lapels

The September House by Carissa Orlando

*This is the 7th book in the 13 Books of Fall.

What new can you do with a haunted house story? The Victorians certainly loved a good ghostly tale in the dark corridors or on the grounds of a manse. But consider how Millennials, the oldest of whom are now reaching forty, are struggling with the goal of homeownership. Will we get spooky apartments stories??

Well, no. And there is a very good reason: a haunted house is always unbelievably cheap, despite the yard and house itself being a total dream come true for all appearances (and a tight-lipped real estate agent). If you’re a fan of the spooky house trope, you know that price can’t be beat because someone (typically a man) murdered his family and then ended his life in that house. And so that brings me to my review of The September House by Carissa Orlando.

One of the reasons I love spookier books is that they are symbolic of real-life issues, a slant way of seeing things. For instance, a haunted house is typically a domestic violence story with a mask on. In Orlando’s book, September is when the ghostly activity ramps up because that’s the month during which generations of people who lived in that house died. Blood starts running down the walls.

However, you can’t pry Margaret out with a crowbar. She and her husband, Hal, were finally able to buy a home after their daughter graduated high school and moved out. Now that Margaret’s in, she’s not moving, not even if the walls bleed and ghosts scream all night for the thirty days of September.

Hal is a different story. He’s a stay-at-home writer who is actually published. He’s got work to do, and it doesn’t help that one of the ghosts laid claim to Hal’s home office about 100 years ago, and he’s a bity little fella. Margaret makes friends with a ghost who was a housemaid. This ghost loves to make tea and pot roast, but come September she frantically moves everything around and creates piles of objects.

But when readers start The September House, Hal is gone. His and Margaret’s daughter, Katherine, keeps calling her dad with no response. Katherine asks Margaret where Hal is for a month, and though Margaret says he’s busy, finally, the jig is up and she confesses she has no clue what happened to Hal. He’s just…gone. Katherine books a flight and comes screaming into the house, demanding and stomping and just being an overall shit head. I could not stand her.

Unfortunately, when Katherine arrives, it’s the end of August. How will Margaret keep her daughter from all the terrors of September? Still, this isn’t just a ghostly story. Like I said, most hauntings are pointing at domestic violence, and as we read what feels like a work of black humor, the real horrors of what happens in some families, situations that can make daughters horrible and wives pliable, are slowly revealed.

I loved the black humor of The September House and hated having to put the book down. I never knew which way things were really going — was Margaret living with ghosts that no one else could see, or was she developing dementia, perhaps schizophrenia? Just to be sure, several times Orlando writes about Margaret overhearing Katherine mention an uncle who obviously had some kind of mental health issues, suggesting the author is trying to make us doubt everything.

I do wish the book were about twenty pages shorter. Just when I thought we were turning a corner into the end, another section takes readers down a different path, one filled with (can you believe this!) way too much description. If I had to go this way with the plot, I actually wish Orland had used more telling than showing.

19 comments

  1. In BBC Ghosts (the closest I will ever get to a proper ghost story, I think!) the main characters try to move out quite early on – they look for new flats where it’s very unlikely that there will be any ghosts for Alison to see. Of course in the first place they look there’s a ghost, and somehow it’s the closest that the show ever gets to being actually spooky – because it’s so surprising and unsettling to find a ghost in a shiny new flat! So I think an author could make a haunted flat story scary if they went about it that way, but I agree haunted houses are much more likely!

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    • Oh, Lou! That is so funny! There are actually haunted apartments in some horror movies, but I’ve only seen it in Asian and African horror movies. I wonder how different the BBC version of Ghosts is to the American one. I see commercials for the American ghosts frequently, suggesting it is beloved here.

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      • I’ve never seen the American version, though it has aired here. I loved every episode of BBC Ghosts until the final Christmas special, which seemed to me to really undo most of the preceding series! So difficult for shows to stick the landing but I do think they did a particularly bad job, which was a shame.

        I think there could be a good ghost story to be had in e.g. finding the ghost of a builder or scaffolder in your shiny new flat because the construction had been mismanaged, and helping your new ghost flatmate to bring their old boss to justice. (This is my preferred sort of ghost story, of course – where there is the possibility for things to be set more-or-less right at the end, and nothing is actually that spooky).

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        • What you said about finding a contractor made me think about how the Mackinac Bridge was built over a long period of time, and during that process, it is said that several of the construction workers actually fell into the poured concrete and are still there to this day. 👻

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  3. Maybe the answer to housing crises is to make sure all houses are haunted, and thus more affordable 🙂 I’ve read some good haunted apartment books though!

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  4. You made me laugh with “hated having to put the book down” and then saying you wished it was 20 pages shorter! What do you want girl! Seriously though, you did explain why so that was OK.

    As you wrote this post, I was thinking this sounds like it’s got humour which would be a plus for me – and then you confirmed it.

    As for spooky apartment stories? I reckon they’d be possible … but they’d have a different trope. There are tumble-down apartments. And I can imagine spooky things wandering in underground parking garages. I know an apartment complex where someone practices his saxophone in the underground parking garage. Just imagine something happening to him, but the saxophone playing on…

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    • Ah ha! I’ve seen many movies and read books in which the piano plays itself in the middle of the night, but never a saxophone.

      The whole book was hard to put down except the last 20pp, so if I could have just closed it, I would have 😂

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  6. This sounds pretty clever. I do like the joke of millenials willing to live in a haunted house because hey, at least it’s cheap! I take comfort in the fact that my 1989 built house is too recent to be haunted, even if it was the cheapest one on the market!

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  7. This sounds like a fun read. And with the husband suddenly gone, I’m already thinking of ways this turns out – did he kill himself, did a ghost kill him, did his wife kill him because he abused her and she had finally had enough? You don’t have to answer (no spoilers!) but there’s always a back story to the haunted houses that have a way of connecting to the present…

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