Day 7 of my Blogtober series to celebrate the Halloween month!

What better way to celebrate the spooky season than a story about a haunted house? While at the bookstore recently, the recently released debut novel of Carissa Orlando, The September House (2023), caught my eye.

Margaret and Hal, after years of moving from place to place, finally find their dream house — a gorgeous Victorian house that is available at a remarkably reasonable price. There’s only one small problem with it, that they learn after they move in: it is very, very haunted. But when you find a house that is otherwise perfect, you aren’t going to let a few phantoms scare you away, especially when most of them are innocuous Victorian children, and one is a genuinely helpful housekeeper. There’s only the thing in the basement that only the ghosts are afraid of that’s the real problem, and they can keep the basement door covered with bible pages and boarded up.

The only time that’s a real problem is the month of September, when everything goes crazy. Screams echo through the house, growing in volume and frequency as the month progresses. Blood starts dripping from the walls, starting upstairs and making its way down the house as September continues. Still, it is manageable, as long as one knows the rules for dealing with the inhabitants, and Margaret and Hal have managed several years — and several Septembers — with only minor incidents, like getting bitten by the ghost child Elias.

But now Hal has had enough, and has moved out, not leaving any indication of where he went. And their adult daughter Katherine, who has never been to the house, is frantic to find him. She’s coming to the house to look for him, and ignores any efforts by her mother to dissuade her. And it is the start of September.

The September House is a mixture of comedy and horror, as Margaret attempts to simultaneously manage increasingly agitated ghosts while simultaneously keeping her daughter from learning anything about them. Much of the book is played for laughs, but there is also serious darkness that unfolds by the end. As the novel progresses, we not only learn more about the history of the house and its undead residents, but also about the history of Margaret and Hal and what has motivated Margaret to stay in such an unprecedented situation. Carissa Orlando is a psychologist, and one can see that influence as she dissects the motivations of the main characters throughout the book.

As I was reading the novel, I started to have the uncomfortable feeling that I had guessed where the story was heading, and that it was a rather obvious approach to take. I am happy to say that Orlando is much more clever than I am, and I found the revelations at the end of the story to be unexpected and satisfying.

Overall, the book seems to be about exploring boundaries, within one’s relationships with the living and the dead, and how to set firm boundaries. I found it a fun and unconventional novel, and one well worth reading. Especially in the month of October, even though it is set in September!