“This house eats and is eaten.” The hunger of a haunted house is encapsulated in this stunning opening line of Trang Thanh Tran’s debut YA horror novel, She Is a Haunting, which comes out tomorrow, February 28. The novel is an innovative take on the haunted house genre, combining the coming-of-age story of a queer teen from an immigrant family with infestational horror that functions to critique colonialism, much like in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic. If either of those themes sound up your alley, you do not want to miss this debut!
Jade Nguyen already feels awkward visiting the homeland that she never got to call home, where her subpar Vietnamese language skills out her immediately as having grown up in America. Add to that, the discomfort of having to spend five weeks with the father whom Jade has never forgiven for walking out on their family four years earlier. But Jade will do whatever it takes to get the money she needs for college without over-burdening her single mom, and Ba has promised his financial support in exchange for Jade helping him with the French Colonial house he’s renovating into a B&B. She just has to get through the summer—which suddenly seems a lot more complicated once Jade realizes the house is haunted. Strange noises emanate from the walls and attic; all varieties of creepy-crawlies plague the house, leaving behind carcasses or disembodied limbs; and Jade wakes up each morning trapped by sleep paralysis. Oh, and then there’s the ghostly bride who appears to Jade in the kitchen one night with an ominous warning: “Do not eat.” All Jade wants is to get out of there, college money or no, but the more she digs into the haunting, the more she realizes her family’s past is entwined with this house. And it’s not going to let them go easily…
As is often the case in Gothic tales, the house in this story, Nhà Hoa, is alive. This is showcased in the novel through passages at the beginning of each section that are from the house’s point of view. Titled with the names of body parts, like “mouth,” “appendix,” “brain,” and “marrow,” these passages depict the house’s thoughts and feelings as it observes the people who inhabit it. It takes Jade quite a while to realize that the house isn’t merely haunted—it is a haunting, and the aims and motives of the house itself must be disentangled from those of the various ghosts that also haunt its halls. But if anyone can match wits with a haunted house, it’s Jade, who is ready to become a haunting herself. One of Jade’s first strategies to escape the house is to stage her own, more obvious, haunting incidents in order to convince her dad to leave. Enlisting the help of a friend, Jade uses hidden speakers, smart bulbs, and other tricks to recreate the kind of haunted house activities we see in movies and paranormal investigation shows. But as her fake haunting begins to blend with the real haunting, even Jade doesn’t know what is real.
As much as Nhà Hoa is haunted by real ghosts (and by teenage pranksters), it is also haunted by the country’s dark colonial past. The house has its origins in the violent conquest of Vietnam by the French, having been built for Roger and Marion Dumont, a high-ranking French officer and his wife. The house is a place out of place—a French structure in a quiet Vietnamese town, housing both Vietnamese locals and their white oppressors, then abandoned for many years. It chooses victims that are similarly out of place, lonely and caught between worlds. One such victim was a young Vietnamese woman who married into the French family and yet was never treated as one of them. Now Jade presents a similarly appetizing opportunity to the house: a Vietnamese-American girl, disconnected from her roots and being pulled in different directions by her two parents. Afraid of how either of them would react if she came out as bisexual, she yearns for a place where she can belong and simply be herself. The house picks up on this yearning and tempts her with possibilities. It, too, is being pulled in different directions as Jade’s father and his business partner try to honor their own heritage and vision while also catering to their white investors’ romantic view of Vietnam’s colonial past. But such tension is what the house thrives on, having filled it from the start.
Definitely check out She Is a Haunting if you enjoy creepy, atmospheric haunted house stories and thought-provoking horror. You can find it on shelves at your favorite local retailer starting tomorrow, or order it online now and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. Once you’ve read it, be sure to let me know what you think in the comments!