Sarah Gailey has bounced around the Speculative Fiction field with her writings – alternate history, science fiction/thriller, fantasy/mystery and with Just Like Home, a gothic horror novel. A young woman named Vera whose relationship with her parents is – to put it very mildly – is complicated, returns home for her mother’s dying days and to get her childhood house in order.
In spite of their long estrangement, in spite of the memories — she’s come back to the home of a serial killer. Back to face the love she had for her father and the bodies he buried there, beneath the house he’d built for his family.
Coming home is hard enough for Vera, and to make things worse, she and her mother aren’t alone. A parasitic artist has moved into the guest house out back and is slowly stripping Vera’s childhood for spare parts. He insists that he isn’t the one leaving notes around the house in her father’s handwriting… but who else could it possibly be?
There are secrets yet undiscovered in the foundations of the notorious Crowder House. Vera must face them and find out for herself just how deep the rot goes.
When Vera arrives at Crowder House, her mother Daphne has made the dining room her “base of operations” given her limited mobility. There is a very minor spoiler below, but the back cover of the book itself reveals the spoiler… Over the years, Daphne has profited off the dark legacy of Francis Crowder, Vera’s father and Daphne’s husband who built Crowder House himself. Francis was a notorious serial killer. I’d say that was a spoiler because it takes a bit of story time before the narrative fully reveals what Francis was, but the back cover of the book flat out states it. But Francis loved his only daughter, Vera; he doted on her, adored her and essentially protected her from Daphne. As much as Francis loved Vera, Daphne’s feelings about her daughter were on the other end of the specturm. Complicating matters even beyond Vera’s parental issues is that Daphne’s “house guest” James Duvall an artist who is absorbing the “aura” of the house for his art. James is not an unkown entity to Vera, his father literally wrote the book on Francis Crowder and his infamous deeds as a serial killer.
The novel is told from Vera’s perspective, but in a unique and fascinating way. We get the “current” timeline of the novel with Vera returning home in the past tense, but when we focus on a pre-teen / teenaged Vera, it is told in the present tense. We only get her perspective, either way. Her wariness in the present about her mother, or Daphne as she’s been calling her mother since she was thirteen becomes understandable the more the past chapters reveal about their lives together. Vera’s whiplash of emotions from being protected and adored by her father to only be verbally and psychologically abused by her mother is raw, it felt real, and I felt a great deal of sympathy for Vera.
The dichotomy of the loving father who just happens to be a serial killer alongside the mentally abusive mother almost paints the parent who is the killer in a better light. At least young Vera is understandably confused and more “loyal” to her father. All around the Crowder house, abuse is potent theme.
There’s also a fascinating deconstruction of the glorification of serial killers going on in Just Like Home. Look at shows like Criminal Minds, the Ted Bundy series on Netflix, the countless true crime shows…we as a society are drawn to killers. Consideration to those closest to the serial killer is not often highlighted, these killers are often parents and spouses. What does it mean for when a child who naturally idolizes one of the parents, but that parent happens to kill a bunch of people? Gailey brilliantly navigates that moral quandary through the Vera’s journey through the novel.
In the present, Vera is continually left unbalanced by her mother’s mood swings which can contradict the spiteful woman she knew growing up. The verbal confrontations with James only amplifies Vera’s sense of unease. To the point that she hears noises, thinks she sees shadows moving, and is convinced *something* is under her bed to the point she goes out and buys a new bed. The icing on the cake of these creepy and potentially supernatural moments are the folded pages she randomly finds that are written in her father’s handwriting. There are more creepy/supernatural elements, I’ll just leave it at that. The timing of the instances of these creepy scenes is expertly doled out by Gailey. She’s got a wonderful sense of pace in the novel. That incredible pacing is also on full display in how Gailey reveals Vera’s past and how she grew closer to her father.
My only minor quibble is how the early narrative skated around the fact that Francis was a serial killer – it was hinted at and implied of course. I contrast that lack of detail with some of the more miniscule details around the physical descriptions of everything else in the narrative.
Just Like Home is an impactful, thought-provoking, intense, and extremely well-written horror novel. This one will sit with me for a while in all the right ways.
© 2023 Rob H. Bedford
Trade Paperback | 352 pages
May 2023 | Published by Tor
Excerpt: https://www.torforgeblog.com/2022/04/23/excerpt-just-like-home-by-sarah-gailey/
https://sarahgailey.com/ | Twitter: @_SarahGailey
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
