Home is where the heart attack is
Synopsis
After a violent incident at work, Tamsin goes looking for a fresh start in a remote cottage far away from her old life. Here she could make real friends, find a job she loves, become a whole new person, even.
But the solitary cottage is actually a semi-detached, with only a thin wall separating her from a total stranger. Her neighbour is an enigma. Dowdy one moment, vivacious the next, but always wearing an unnerving smile. Tamsin can’t shake the feeling that there’s something wrong with her, especially when she starts experiencing disturbances in her own home.
As the locals share strange stories about her house, and her barely contained paranoia spirals out of control, Tamsin begins to suspect that the past she was so desperate to escape might never let her go.
Review
From the very beginning of reading this utterly, deeply superb debut horror novel – out now from Solaris – I felt anxious, like the opening had been tailor-made for me to have a mild panic attack. Tamsin rocks up to her new house in a remote Scottish cottage, hoping for a fresh, and very isolated, start after a mysterious incident at work which made her leave her job. But this detached hideaway cottage is actually a semi-detached, and she already has a neighbour. It’s an anxious start for empathetic introverts. Then it turns out that she’s not really done any research and nothing really works in the house. We hadn’t even had any horror yet and I was already more uneasy than a potato in a chip factory. And, frankly, this nerve-jangling never stops, transitioning smoothly from the awkward to the utterly sinister, as Tamsin briefly meets (but mostly hears through the thin walls) her strange neighbour, learns about the strange stories about the house from the seemingly hostile locals, and struggles to deal with her own prickly personality. It all creates this haunting Suspiria-like build up, with a keen sense of weirdness and humour, until the emotionally stirring ending where all of Tamsin’s psychological chickens come home to roost in this creepy cottage in the most terrifying but also emotionally redemptive of ways. Be unsettled, be very unsettled.
The first half, as Tamsin navigates meets the locales and tries to establish what her neighbour is up to, is often just as weird and funny and sweet as unsettling and uneasy. Grist is a very witty writer, and captures well oddity and surreality and just plain good Scottish humour. She’s also great at capturing the spirit of a minor character; the story of one local, who seems to be trying to help her, is an unexpectedly powerful scene. Grist is also good at the surreal; you’re never sure what part could be the product of a locally sourced mushroom trip or not.
But it’s the final third, based entirely in the creepy cottage, that makes this book. This is where psychological horror blends in with a specific kind of Scottish folklore horror, and it is in parts utterly, bed-wettingly terrifying, reminding me of some of the haunted house chills of say, Josh Malerman’s spine-tingling Incidents Around the House. Grist can turn your blood into ice in a moment, put it that way.
But this book is also about psychological redemption, and so it also reminded me of one of my favourite horror authors Rachel Harrison, who uses the supernatural events befalling her female leads to examine the trauma and injustices that have befallen them and whether they can escape the cycle of trauma they’re trapped in. Grist examines the injustices that have come Tamsin’s way, and turned her into someone so unable to function in society, and whether it is everyone else’s fault, or her fault, or whether there is a more healthy third alternative. The way Grist balances this terror and surreality with a potentially redemptive arc, as terrifying as it is heroic, is genuinely something to behold and surely one of the most emotionally powerful and clever denouements to a horror novel this year.
Overall, Home Sick is a strange, simmering, unsettling mix of psychological, folklore, and haunted house horror that yanks the anxiety dial up to 11 before leaving you with a final act that is so completely unhinged, utterly terrifying and so emotionally and redemptively explosive that it’s hard not to conclude it’s one of the must-read horror novels of the year
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