“A ghost was how a building held a grudge.” What if Cinderella was a ghost, murdered by her stepmother and only able to interact with the world outside the home she haunts for the three precious nights of the prince’s ball? Freya Markse (whose The Last Binding series I absolutely loved) puts a delightful, eerie spin on this classic fairy tale in her bite-size novella Cinder House, which came out earlier this fall.
Ella was sixteen years old when her stepmother Patrice poisoned the tea she was drinking with her father. After tumbling down the stairs in her weakened state, Ella slowly wakes to find that she is a ghost and her consciousness has blended with the house she now haunts. She experiences emotions through the structure of the house—rage in the burning hearths, fear in the rattling windows, sorrow through the weeping taps. She also feels anything that happens to the house: mess and disorder feel like an irritating itch, while destroying any part of the house will cause her physical pain—as her sadistic stepsister Greta is quick to exploit. Greta is an ambitious young sorceress who specializes in fire spells, but is quite adept at causing pain without magic, as well. Between Greta’s threats of violence to the house, the imperious disdain of Patrice and her other stepsister Danica, and her own compulsion to keep her home tidy, Ella all too easily falls into the role of ghostly maidservant, waiting hand and foot upon her murderers. As the years pass, Ella yearns for a life beyond the confines of her haunting. She finds a small measure of camaraderie by striking up a correspondence with a foreign scholar and discovers a small loophole in her haunting that allows her to explore beyond her house in the evenings until the clock strikes midnight. But the real opportunity comes when she strikes a bargain with a fairy for a pair of magical shoes that will allow her to dance for three nights at the prince’s ball.
Cinder House is a brilliant haunted house story, but not in the traditional horror sense. Instead, this is a fantasy story that really digs into the logic and mechanics of what makes a haunting and how they work. The story takes place in a fantasy secondary world where sorcerers, fairies, and other magical creatures live alongside non-magical humans and the existence of ghosts is generally accepted. Houses can develop a magic and sort of sentience of their own, as well. And such houses—if made angry by, say, the murder of their rightful owners—are prone to holding grudges in the form of a ghost. Ghosts, then, are bound to their homes and cannot exist without them. Ella takes a scientific approach to studying the limits and abilities of her new form of existence, while strengthening her theoretical understanding of ghosts and magic through conversations with her fairy friend Quaint and letters with her pen pal Scholar Mazamire. This unexpected blend of logic and magic really elevates the story from a simple fairy tale to a fully realized world you can imagine inhabiting.
This novella also takes an interesting approach to the Gothic trope of curses. When Prince Jules was born—in a scene borrowing elements from another classic fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty—a mysterious fairy arrived to give the baby a “blessing.” She casts a spell often misinterpreted as making him “irresistibly charming” while he dances. In reality, this blessing functions as a curse, leaving Prince Jules unable to engage in his passion for dance without driving all observers into a violently obsessive frenzy. Though many Gothic stories are about either breaking curses or marinating in their inevitability, Ella and Jules instead set about exploring loopholes that, while not ending the curse, will make it easier to live with. And by the end of the story, Freya Marske is able to bring in some of her trademark steaminess by turning what was once a rather bleak curse into a playful kink.
As I learned from the Last Binding series, Freya Markse is a master at creating both lush fantasy worlds and vibrant queer characters with captivating love stories—but it’s even more impressive to see her fit all this into a 133-page novella. If you’re looking for a quick end-of-year read to cap off your reading goals, definitely check out Cinder House! You can find it on shelves now at your favorite local retailer or buy it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. Let me know what you think in the comments, and feel free to recommend other fairy tale retellings with a Gothic twist!