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Raise your hand if you had a house project while in lockdown. Raise your hand if it was an expansion or making the space more ‘liveable’, a better chance to distance yourself from the loving family you were suddenly shackled to. Hell, wave spirit fingers if you hit up Zillow again for a daily dopamine rush involving domestic daydreams of a sunroom.

Let’s face it, our homes and their ideal changed once we were forced to stay in them for lockdown. Maybe yours was too tight for your family, that groan in the attic took a sinister turn, or even perhaps the crone secretly living in your walls showed herself since you were starting to cramp her space. Homes, our solace and respite at the end of the long working day, were suddenly our cages. 

Now let’s turn to a genre where everyone has a favorite. The Haunted House. Does it feel like many Haunted House stories have been on the shelves in the last few years? (The lockdown was nearly four years ago, btw) You’re not wrong and you’re (likely) not crazy. The first page of Amazon’s Horror genre has at least ten novels with ‘House’ in the title or a quaint little mansion on the cover and it’s changing every week. Home, the one place designed to be our safe spaces, places we are forced to inhabit, wouldn’t it be a shame if it was infested with a terrible, malevolent presence? (My mother lived with us in lockdown btw)

The Haunted House has always been on the horror community’s mind, a trope that evolved into the higher function of a staple. And yes, let’s also throw out there that the Haunted House, often portrayed as the antagonist (New York is the fifth girl in SATC!), is usually only a vessel for more sinister and metaphorical demons. They aren’t only reservoirs, they are depositories for the traumas we bring into them. Likely your favorite author has a Haunted House (or hotel, or mansion, or abode) in their bibliography. But these last few years, many authors, (traditional, indie, and self) are slinging their ideas onto paper. We’ve all got our trauma played out in the houses we were locked in. We stewed. We festered. We likely damaged some livers and DIY’d a demo or upgrade. We certainly wrote about it.

Cards on the table, I’ve got my own trauma with my current house. Forced to move from my Italian dream house to Americana suburbia on the exact worst week in the last four years to buy (if you know you know), my husband was fifth in line to see our house that went on Zillow an hour earlier. We paid many thousands over the asking price for a house I never stepped inside. We fought, negotiated, prayed to the Elder Gods, and oh, boy, paid for our house (and we were lucky to be able to do so). So, yeah, if I suddenly uproot an old corpse in the basement and resurrect her angry spectre, you bet I’m fighting that bitch tooth and nail and then charging her back rent.

First of all, let’s pay homage to the GOATs. King’s The Shining, Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Matheson’s Hell House, and so many others. (No one come at me for leaving out your favorite -there are a lot). Gothic, Paranormal, and Extreme, these are go-tos not only for the vivid and memorable characters but because the sensation of the home/hotel/satanic-orgy-pit as a singular character is just too strong. Jackson’s gothic prose and description of Hill House still live rent-free (lucky bastard!) in my head. 

But what about the Covid Renaissance of the Haunted House? Mexican Gothic. The Spite House. The Exorcist’s House. A House with Good Bones. Four years on, let’s agree we all have extensive knowledge of the importance our homes hold and how they can instantly become a cold, inhospitable jail.

In this Renaissance (I’m pushing this), authors are writing in both new and old worlds. Last year Grady Hendrix saw the opportunity to merge the booming parallel markets of real estate and horror with How to Sell a Haunted House, while Elizabeth Hand was given the first-ever authorization from the Jackson estate to return to the world of Hill House, resurrecting its specters. In the difficult time of being locked down (you have to stay in your house now!) paired with a housing crisis (but I don’t have a house!), there are very few Haunted House stories not of interest. Only a year into lockdown, Nick Cutter and Andrew Sullivan started drafting The Handyman Method, perfectly encapsulating the natural progression of it all; writing our experiences. We write what we know. I’d bet my next kitchen upgrade Nick Cutter had something break during Covid and had to schedule a sketchy handyman, ended up at Home Depot himself, found it infuriatingly impossible, and voila! His next bestseller.

The horror house trade has even gone so far that it seems to be turning meta. Admitting that Horror and houses go together like crown molding and wainscotting, Christina Henry’s The House that Horror Built is waiting in my library bag, and reads as it admits, yeah, houses are scary places, what’s new. Let’s get freaky with it.

We should also acknowledge that not everyone lives in the American white picket fence 3bdrm 2bth dream (with a sunroom?). We’re packed into apartments, town homes, condos, parent’s basements, tiny homes, RVs, mobile homes, and vans. (Some are homeless, but that is a whole other horror story.) Suddenly living in a van by the river is a goal, not a failure. Some of us were more fortunate and shucked society, moving to the country for compounds and communes. The nature of housing is changing. Hell, the nature of living is changing, and our horror is reflecting that.

Here is what I have taken from my years being stuck inside and how this relates to this Renaissance (are we officially calling it that, yet?). We’ve seen some shit. Some of us more than others. Covid killed and hurt and scared a lot of us. Some of us felt safe in our homes, some not so much. The poltergeist of an ornery mother-in-law is going to really need to up her game if she wants to chill my bones. I’ve had to prove to a mortgage company I earned the money in my account. I’ve seen some shit.

So what is the terrifying future of Haunted Houses? (Jokes! (mad cackle) It’s all a bloody nightmare!) Have we already arrived in the Covid era? Sentient houses, a la Brian Asman with ‘Man, Fuck This House’. Inviting strangers and ghosts into your Open House a bad idea via Nico Bell? Houses where there shouldn’t be houses (Koontz’s The House at the End of the World)? Monster’s brought in from other places to ruin borders’ lives (Adam Neville’s ‘No One Gets Out Alive). Hey, other countries have seen some shit too (Trang Than Tran’s She is a Haunting)!  There is so much new and horrific in so many ways. It’s wonderful, we’re all exercising our demons, and we should all be proud.

 But let’s be real, with the housing crisis of 2022-present (oops, sorry, 2008?), the everything crisis, the material is writing itself. It’s gonna get real wild up there on the shelves. Are we going to see Slashers where bidding-war buyers take out the competition and the ghost forever haunts their new build? Are the middle-aged friends buying a house together (because finances) going to battle royale with homunculi hibernating in the soil beneath? A territorial war for that master bedroom and that vintage claw tub? Will we go into another lockdown (the real terror is that this one might actually happen)? Are future Martian colonists living in space bunkers going to deal with the waking deity below their compound (let’s not exclude sci-fi horror now)? The future of housing is bleak and we all love clicking on a macabre Zillow listing. 

I also want to honorably mention the movie ‘His House’, now four years old. If you haven’t watched it, fix that. Like most stories where houses serve as a stage for our internal terrors, this movie documenting the horrendous experiences of refugees, taken from everything they know and thrown into government housing (usually terrible), highlights it so perfectly.

So tonight, while you’re laying in bed, give thanks to your home, that working AC, and that right now, it’s not infested with a terrible, malevolent presence lying in the bed beside you. Spoiler alert; it’s us, we’re the terrible presences. We’re haunting our own houses (this was always the answer.)

Rowan Hill is the horror/sci-fi author currently living in America. Her debut collection, No Fair Maidens From Earth to Mars, will be released October, 2024 with Trepidation Press. She loves a plot twist within a plot twist and a flawed woman who occasionally murders and has many stories of such things. She is a child of the 80s and is never far away from making her own dark synth soundtrack. She can be found on social media or her website writerrowanhill.com.