Here’s a recommendation for all of you looking for a good haunted house story this Halloween. What happens when a faux haunting becomes all too real? Christa Carmen (whose Poe-laced thriller Beneath the Poet’s House I reviewed earlier this year) explores this concept and more in her latest horror novel How to Fake a Haunting, which came out on October 7.
Lainey Taylor is married to an alcoholic. Callum is handsome and charming, from one of the wealthiest and most influential families in Rhode Island, but he can barely go a day without drinking himself into violent rages and stumbling stupors. The final straw comes when he gets into a drunken car accident that nearly kills both Lainey and their four-year-old daughter, Beatrix. Lainey knows she has to get herself and Beatrix away from Callum, but if she were to initiate a divorce, his family’s powerful lawyers would ensure he gets full custody. Somehow she has to make leaving Callum’s own idea…. Luckily Lainey’s quirky coworker Adelaide has a brilliant plan: they’ll convince Callum the house is haunted! It’s a tall order, considering they live in a new build they constructed themselves, with no history of grisly murders or tragic deaths. But Callum’s drinking already leaves him susceptible to confusion and paranoia, and Adelaide has plenty of horror movies and ghost hunting shows to draw inspiration from. At first, haunting her husband makes Lainey feel more powerful than she has in years, but it’s not long before the haunting takes on a life of its own, manifesting in ways she and Adelaide couldn’t possibly have engineered. Now Lainey must figure out how to stop the haunting before it can harm the one person she started it all to protect.
This book really gets you thinking about what makes a haunting. On the surface level, what visual and physical phenomena do we expect from a haunting? It’s not just transparent specters floating through walls. What about blood pouring from the water fixtures, strange smells emanating from the walls, and a preponderance of flies? How many creative ways can you convince someone their house is haunted? But the book also gets at the deeper, underlying question of what makes a haunting. Does the inciting incident have to be a death, or can someone be haunted by their own past mistakes or future doom?
How to Fake a Haunting also gets into the psychological effects of staging a haunting—not just on the victim but on the person doing the haunting. Lainey spooks herself sometimes, an inevitable side effect, especially when she allows Adelaide to surprise her with elements of the haunting so that her reactions can seem more genuine in front of Callum. But more than just the suspension of disbelief necessary to put on a good act, there is the temptation to believe in her own lies. The sight of her abusive husband helpless and cowering awakens a darker side of Lainey. It’s almost addicting to suddenly feel like she is the one in control, while Callum suffers the emotions Lainey has felt too often during their marriage. Can you drive another person—no matter how deserving—toward insanity without losing some of our own sanity in the process? Can you get your revenge without becoming just as bad as everything you were fighting against?
This book goes to some pretty dark places and touches on several delicate topics quite graphically, so you may want to check the trigger warnings on a site like StoryGraph. But if you’re in a place to handle the rollercoaster ride from light-hearted horror pranks to some real heavy stuff, I highly recommend checking out How to Fake a Haunting. 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. Once you’ve read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments!