This horror follows Margaret after her husband walks out of their Victorian home after deciding he couldn't take another September in the house. September is when the walls of the house start dripping blood and when the ghosts of previous residents come out even more than usual. Margaret has learned to live with and even enjoy the company of the ghosts in the house so she's not leaving. Eventually, their daughter Katherine decides that a month of not hearing from her father is long enough and she comes to town to look for him. Margaret is worried more about keeping Katherine safe during her September stay but as the investigation into Hal's disappearance escalates, so do the hauntings and the house might have a secret of its own.
This was an absolutely fantastic read where the premise paid off 100%. I was hooked from the first sentence and read this straight through. Initially, I thought maybe this was a little bit too quirky of a set-up and it would get old quickly. However, I loved how Orlando worked in some more heart and serious topics into the story and used those as a way to sort of ground the plot in reality. There are also complicated family dynamics at play and those also add depth and complexity to the story and characters.
TW/CW: alcoholism, domestic violence, child death, suicide
I absolutely loved Margaret's voice and character. She was such a compelling character to follow and her more no-nonsense personality helped temper the over-the-top ghost shenanigans. We get to see her face a number of different situations and I found her an incredibly interesting and complex character. She seems like a normal housewife on the outside, but there's a lot of layers to her psychology that Orlando expertly explores. Given how close we follow Margaret, I was incredibly excited when we got to the potentially unreliable narrator (no spoilers if Margaret is unreliable or not) because I hadn't even considered that she might be unreliable until then. I was 100% on board with her and her story. Usually with thriller/mystery/horror reads, I'm on the lookout for unreliable narrators since that is one of my favorite tropes so when one can catch me off guard like this, I'm thrilled.
The horror aspects were fantastic and really straddled the line between a little silly and absolutely horrifying. It was giving me Ghostbusters mixed with Poltergeist and a touch of The Exorcist. The ghosts that haunt the house all died horrific deaths and there is a good bit of gore in this read. But a lot of the antics they get up to come off pretty funny, especially with Margaret's dry sense of humor about the situation. The more details we get about the lore of the house and the reasons behind the haunting, the darker the story gets. The supernatural events also get more severe as the month progresses which helps propel the plot forward.
Overall, this was a very entertaining read with fantastic characters and lore building. I was hooked from the very beginning and was pleasantly surprised at the emotional depth we got with the family history.
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