In my undergrad I took a class on gothic fiction because I had loved Anne Rice’s vampires as a teen. Beneath the intricate storylines, the effortless, evocative prose and seductive characters I felt that there was something much older, something more forbidden at play that couldn’t be so easily spoken out loud in contemporary society.
There was. So much, in fact.
In my Horror and Terror seminar I came to understand that horror genre allows a writer to peek into the attic, wander through the abandoned house, sweep away the cobwebs, dig beneath the overgrown rosebush to discover that proverbial skeleton in the closet and the monster lurking in the shadows.
In this way, Trynne Delaney’s award winning, debut novel A House Unsettled offers an unflinching look into the messy, often difficult, confusing and contradictory realities of growing up queer and of mixed raced in a society that’d rather practice selective amnesia than to challenge or question the status quo.
Asha and her mother Traci return to a small town in rural New Brunswick to get a fresh start after Asha’s father’s incarceration. Asha’s mother is white, her father, Black. The circumstances surrounding Asha’s father’s arrest and questions about his culpability remain rather vague and unresolved throughout the novel, which works nicely with the overarching theme of negotiating and writing about the lived experiences racialized people that refuse and refute neat, easily understood categories.
Traci inherits her aunt Agatha’s splendid, decrepit country manor, not too far away from another house: vandalized but not necessarily decrepit nor exactly forsaken farmhouse that once belonged to Asha’s father’s people. One haunted, the other forced to abandon. Asha’s paternal grandparents, the story reveals, were Black Loyalists who settled in rural New Brunswick. Folks who had built the town, worked the land, and would one day be driven out, had their contributing presence all but whited-out of the landscape they had once helped to cultivate and build, sometimes under violent, extractive labour practices that if differed from chattel slavery at all, it did so mostly in name and appearance.
Then, there’s the triad of ghosts: two star-crossed women and a patriarch. Recluse Aggie, Asha’s maternal aunt, who resides in the ceiling, floating above the living as she once had–the story insinuates–during her lifetime, leading a mercurial dual life as high society socialite happily married the local timber magnate Elis and as a closeted queer woman in love with her neighbour Sabrina who, the novel tells us, had disappeared one day.
Literary readers will recognize parallels to Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s unsettling Femme Noire, The Yellow Wallpaper. Other such literary allusions peppered throughout the novel pay overt and implicit homage to literary heroines who similarly grapple with patriarchy in and through fiction.
The scant generic intrigue and menace present this novel, paying allegiance to the Murder Mystery-Horror conventions, reside in unearthing just who killed Sabrina and who was deemed culpable in the eyes of society oblivious to its racial bigotry: just what did happen with Aunt Aggie, Sabrina and the ever-menacing zealot, Ellis? A multi-faceted, more-than-meets the eye set of questions that reverberate in the rear-jacket of and indeed throughout as narrative frame and social critique: who built this house? Whose money? Whose blood?
The true horror is living with history itself.
The living cast, aside from Asha and her mother, include Asha’s platonic friend in the city Nia–away on their own journey of return to Freetown, Sierra Leone–who often reminds us that for young people, their chosen families offer more safety and emotional support than a home, or an idea of a home, ever could.
In stark contrast, Asha’s white stepdad Jeff is a caricature of a tesla driving, self-involved man-child. Jeff is convinced that financial security is sufficient to rise above one’s humbler family beginnings without ever realizing that he is afforded that privilege as a straight white male in such a way Asha could never aspire as a mixed-race queer child with a father in jail. Jeff’s attempt to be a father in the traditional sense falls comically short and reminds us that good intentions aren’t always enough when we don’t commit to exploring our blind spots.
Then there’s Cole — Nicole to her parents, grand niece of Sabrina, French Canadian, niece of an RCMP officer whose job status and blood ties pose challenges and provoke questions for both Asha and Cole about their relationship to each other, their families and their community. Cole is more than just a neighbour. They are Asha’s sometimes hot and sometimes not indeterminate love interest, sister-friend, childhood playmate, partner-in-crime (literally) and a broken mirror in which Asha sometimes catches glimpses of own budding sexual identity, even as it fractures other aspects of her being.
If Delaney’s House Unsettled reads more a madhouse than a haunted one, I believe this the true success of this unsettling story. At no point does the novel allows you to settle into a comfortable and comforting sense of certainty about any character. Even when the central mystery seems to be resolved in a conventional way, you are left to wonder what’s next for these people in the wake of the cinder and smoke. The novel is relentless in asking: what do we do when the intersecting legacies of racial violence, extractive practices, generational trauma, gender and sexual violence, class bigotry, the underlying cognitive dissonance of it all bleed into our waking realities and haunt our being?
Just how much harder could that be for today’s young people feeling left stranded in this tangled web by those who came before them and with whom they must negotiate the very act of taking up space together?
And all of this, in Delaney’s fresh and smoldering prose. Give it a read; it’s a slow burn!
Amiththan Sebarajah is a long distance hiker, writer, and a collector stories. An educator in training, Amiththan believes firmly in the power of the narrative implicit and the radical act of telling the untold story.
“‘How do you say goodbye to these kids? We might never see them again. Like, ever.’ ‘Perhaps. But you say goodbye to them knowing how lucky you were to spend the week with them. Some families will get back for another camp session next year. Some might not. But in the here and now? This group is on land together, and that’s a beautiful thing.’”
Literacy teachers are always looking for new ways to inspire creativity and deepen students’ understanding of language. Rudy Francisco’s “I’ll Fly Away” is a a compilation of invented words, each followed by a poem that illustrates the meaning of the created word.