The House That Horror Built
Christina Henry
Titan Books, 14 May 2024
Available as: HB, 336pp, audio, e
Source: Advance e-cop
ISBN(PB): 9781803364032
I'm grateful to Titan for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The House That Horror Built to consider for review.
Christina Henry's horror stories are always challenging and creepy, but in The House That Horror Built she's really surpassed herself. Explicitly addressing the conventions of the genre, this story also takes on issues of homelessness and economic precariousness ('resentment is a familiar meal when you can't afford contentment'), religious indoctrination and social privilege.
Harry, the lead character, is a single mother scraping a living in Chicago as the US comes out of covid lockdown. Hard up (she's a waitress and of course the restaurants are mostly closed) she's lucky enough - or so it seems - to get a cleaning job with reclusive and scandal-hit film director Javier Castillo. Through Christina Henry's portrayal, Harry emerges as resourceful, stretching her slender means beyond all reasonable expectations to support her son, Gabe (Gabriel) - juggling bills and supermarket coupons, always with an eye on what can be obtained cheaply.
Harry has been estranged from her Fundamentalist parents for decades (they were controlling and abusive - burning her stash of horror magazines was only the start) and the focus of her life is raising Gabe who's a star pupil but just entering those difficult teenage years. Gabe is delighted when Harry scores her new job with Javier, but as he moves further into the director's circles, Harry becomes concerned at events in Bright Horses House, Javier's isolated mansion...
I loved this book. The relationship between Harry and Gabe is wonderfully done. As a parent I can sympathise with the line Harry treads between protecting her son, sacrificing her time and attention for him, and the need not to control, to let him grow. I can also sympathise with Javier, who has his own parenting issues (his wife and son disappeared amid murky rumours of the Hollywood cover-up of a crime the boy may have committed). Harry and Gabe are horror addicts, and it was both scary and funny when they began to dissect events at Bright Horses House in the light of the grammar and conventions of the horror film. I always think horror is at its best when it is successfully self aware, as here, though this is a very difficult thing for authors to get right. To begin with they have to find a really convincing answer to that 'don't go near the old scary house' trope, because both readers and characters are fully aware of it. Here, Harry's poverty helps - but then the setting of the story in the margins of the film industry gives an added dimension to Harry's concerns over a particularly nasty prop.
It is a story that carefully builds and layers tension, as convention demands, but also, organically and credibly, given what's going on outside Bright Horses House. Harry's threatened with eviction, something that - given her shaky position on the bottom rung of society - is both all-consuming and impossible to deal with (when does she have the opportunity to house-hunt? How could she afford to move if she did). That adds a degree of menace as well as preventing her bailing out when things get weird. Sometimes horror doesn't 't mean bangs in the night and movement glimpsed out of the corner of an eye. The threat of ending up sleeping under a bridge or being followed by a creep because one can't afford the bus fare can be equally alarming.
Examining the stresses and guilt of parenthood, the story gives us three examples - Harry's strict parents, Javier's absent father, and Harry's and Gabe's (over?) close relationship. There are so many ways it can all go wrong, so many ways to lose one's kid and end up alone in a creepy old mansion...
In the end Henry gives us a spectacular climax that will leave you unable to put this story down until you reach the last page. It's a fitting ending to a magnificent story that sees her on top form.
For more information about The House That Horror Built , see the publisher's website here.
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