Welcome friend! The September House is a captivating debut with dark humor and such an addicting narration that I didn’t want to stop once I started. The first day, I read 66 pages, the second, I reached page 188 and the third day, I had completed the book. What is The September House about, you ask? Take a look below:
Carissa Orlando | Goodreads
Nominee for Best Horror (2023), Nominee for Best Debut Novel (2023)
A woman is determined to stay in her dream home even after it becomes a haunted nightmare in this compulsively readable, twisty, and layered debut novel.
When Margaret and her husband Hal bought the large Victorian house on Hawthorn Street—for sale at a surprisingly reasonable price—they couldn’t believe they finally had a home of their own. Then they discovered the hauntings. Every September, the walls drip blood. The ghosts of former inhabitants appear, and all of them are terrified of something that lurks in the basement. Most people would flee.
Margaret is not most people.
Margaret is staying. It’s her house. But after four years Hal can’t take it anymore, and he leaves abruptly. Now, he’s not returning calls, and their daughter Katherine—who knows nothing about the hauntings—arrives, intent on looking for her missing father. To make things worse, September has just begun, and with every attempt Margaret and Katherine make at finding Hal, the hauntings grow more harrowing, because there are some secrets the house needs to keep.
Content notes include domestic abuse, gore, blood, alcoholism, injury detail, mental illness.
The September House – Review
Becoming a homeowner is an exhilarating experience. Clinton and I bought our house in 2021 and, like Margaret, I knew the moment I saw the listing that this house might be the one. I distinctly remember the spring day in April when we got possession of the house and I joked about haunting it. The difference is that Margaret’s house was already haunted by the time she moved in. Both her and her husband had led nomadic lives as children and became homeowners in their 50s. Their daughter, Katherine, was already long moved out by the time they bought the house on Hawthorne Street.
Margaret is a captivating narrator. She is passionate about the house in a way I have never read. Her humor is dark and funny and I could not get enough of it. She isn’t at all frazzled by the beings that also call her house home. She calls them pranksters. Things can freak her out but only so many times. She believes that she can survive anything and as the story progresses, I got a good understanding of how she came to be this way. She will coexist with them. She will not leave.
That’s not exactly true for her husband, Hal. The spirits are quite active in September and after 3 horrendous Septembers, Hal is not interested in living there anymore. Margaret, like I said, she is not leaving. The events that transpire in The September House are in the fourth September of Hal and Margaret moving in. Hal, unable to face another month, has vanished. Their daughter, Katherine, not having heard from her father in some time, is worried and has decided to come to the house and help Margaret find him. This couldn’t be worse timing for a visit. So far, M&H had been able to postpone Katherine’s visits. They didn’t want to explain the apparitions, the screaming, the moaning, the house leaking blood, the boarded up basement door. There is no more avoiding that now.
The September House portrays Katherine’s search for her father. Margaret is trying to help as much as she can but she is constantly drawn back to the house. Whether it is writing on some bar’s bathroom stall or the name of the clerk at the motel, everything points back to the basement of the house.
“He is down there.”
The September House
As Margaret and Katherine search for Hal, Margaret is trying to keep the house in order. She cleans blood whenever she sees it. She disposes off dead birds in her yard. She gets an old priest to perform an exorcism like he had done in previous years but this time feels different.
Katherine is quite unlikable. She is the single child who demands things and thinks she knows better. At thirty years of age, she has a successful career but in her personal life, she is single and has much to understand of her childhood and her parents’ relationship. The three of them have never been open about the past and Hal’s disappearance leads to Katherine questioning Margaret’s choices. Margaret struggles to support her daughter emotionally. There are a number of times through the book when she knows she should say something but she is so caught up in the house’s activities that she is paralysed. Gary Chapman calls these sliding door moments. The good thing is Margaret shows up when she truly needs to.
One of my biggest worries with a horror story about a house is my active imagination. Thankfully, The September House is about a very specific house with a long history of bad things. There are a number of people stuck in this house and the reason why they are all still there, Master Vale, lives in the basement. I found him to be quite creepy. His backstory was convincing. I also quite enjoyed Frederika, the helpful housekeeper who is ever present to make tea and dinner for Margaret, boiling a kettle at every opportunity she gets. Come September though, things get out of hand. Frederika starts stacking furniture on top of one another (this I found hilarious), putting things away in wrong places (why are all the knives in the bathroom?)… and Katherine can’t see her so she thinks Margaret is going crazy.
Often in horror and suspense thrillers, the narrator is portrayed to be unreliable. The way Margaret is written, I could never see her as unreliable. I believed her account and the more of the history of her relationship with Hal and Katherine had been revealed, the more I felt for her. She has survived horrible things and she has a way of navigating tough situations. She also has limits to what is unacceptable and her love as a mother shines through in parts of the narrative.
The September House was recommended to me by a fellow Canadian bookstagramer, Sue of soobooksalot. She is a voracious reader of horror and you know I love horror. I decided to pick up something she adored and this is going to be the first of many books I will read from her list.
I flew through this book! Highly recommended for all horror fans. Let me know if it creeps you out. I didn’t find it scary, just highly immersive. A great debut! Add it on Goodreads.
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