The Perfect Home Goes Wrong

In this novel, Harry and Sasha move from the city to rural Idaho, into their dream house. An elderly couple comes to welcome them to the neighborhood—they think. Actually, Dan and Lucy have come to warn their new neighbors. There’s an evil spirit located in their valley, and it haunts each home anew every season. Will they abandon their dream home because of this spirit? Or will they figure out how to exorcise it? 

Newlywed couple Holly and Robert face off against two other couples in a reality TV show called, “To the Manor Build,” where they compete to renovate an old home. This cozy mystery kicks off when the couple goes missing—and their assistant Erika, a Holly lookalike who’s obsessed with Robert, starts to garner attention as a person of interest. She gets help from her mother to figure out what happened… and they realize the house they’ve been renovating could play a key role.

Speaking of construction projects, Colquitt and Walter Kennedy enjoy their suburb outside of Atlanta, GA. Until contractors break ground on the oddly shaped vacant lot next door—something they always assumed was impossible because of its wild grading and overgrown landscape. As the modern home (totally out of line with the current homes’ styles) starts to take shape, all the neighbors become increasingly obsessed with it… and the house seems to become obsessed with them, too. This novel might sound like a typical haunted house tale, but it’s truly out of the mainstream. How can a new build be haunted?

In this vacation home, every turn is dangerous. Darcy met her three best friends in France during a study abroad trip. On the weekends, they’d visit her grandmother, Seraphine, in Provence. Twenty years later, Seraphine invites them all back, and they go, of course, back to the beautiful chateau of their young adulthood. Then, after a night of partying, they discover the brutally murdered body of Seraphine—and while they try to figure out what happened, pictures of them in the house pop up online, revealing that the murderer is now stalking each of them, as well.

When single mother Louise’s parents die suddenly in a car crash, she has to go back to her hometown of Charleston to deal with their estate. As she and her estranged brother fight over who executes the will and who inherits what, the house full of puppets and dolls—yes, their mother was a puppeteer—seems to weigh in on its own, making its own demands of Eric and Nancy’s legacy. If you want a truly freaky tale of someone’s childhood home fulfilling all their childhood nightmares, you’ll love this novel. And be sure to check out Hendrix’s Horrorstor next, about a haunted Ikea.

These seven stories each contain a house, and in each one of them, there’s a fresh hell. Whether there’s a ghost, or the opposite of a home burglary, they unveil the false sense of security we associate with our own homes. If you’ve read any of Samanta Schweblin’s other works, then you already know you’re in for a harrowing adventure.