The Place Where They Buried Your Heart by Christina Henry

 

It's so refreshing to read an actually good--really, really fucking good--horror novel. No hiding behind various "literary" authorial bullshit, just a horror novel that builds. It's a sort of almost generational haunted house novel, the house stands for nearly a century, the narrator lives through like twenty years, long enough that there's a real feel change when she transitions from writing about her memories of being a kid to writing about herself as an adult (and the sense her memories of things are shaping her narration of her childhood is real, without making her out to be a liar). The people in the novel feel like people, they might not be exactly like what you'd find in a working class, then gentrified neighborhood in Chicago, but they feel like people and that's what really matters. Henry's voice tends to the straightforward, there aren't any real flights of fancy, no straining toward something heightened, but it's solid and there are some nicely turned phrases and some well-realized dialogue. It's nice to see the inhumanity of the haunting (which is arguably something more than a haunting, but whatever) broken by very human emotions, a mix of what people would think of as good and bad but entirely human. A genuine delight to read.