Review:
When Margaret and Hal bought their home somewhere between three and four years ago, it was supposed to be a dream come true. They'd both always wanted to own their own home, but for various reasons it had never been in the cards. Now their daughter is all grown up and living on her own, Hal is doing better than he has in a while, and the house, due to a few deaths in its history, is reasonably priced despite being a beautiful Victorian.
The basement is a problem right from the start - something about it just feels wrong - but it's not hard to avoid going there. However, it's September when the house reaches its fully haunted potential. Hal can barely stand to be there during their first and second September, and by their third he's determined to find a solution. Margaret, meanwhile, just develops a set of rules and follows them. It's now time for her fourth September in the house, and she's fully prepared. Then her daughter calls, wants to know where Hal is, and won't take "he's busy" for an answer.
Hal left the house a month ago, unable to take its creepy ghost children and September's bleeding walls and constant nighttime screaming. Margaret is made of sterner stuff. She isn't about to let a few ghosts push her out of her dream home, and besides, it's generally a nice place to live 11 months out of the year. But she and Hal never told their daughter, Katherine, about the house's issues, and Margaret had never intended for her to find out. Now Katherine's insisting on visiting during the worst month of the year, determined to track Hal down since it doesn't seem like Margaret's going to, and Margaret has no idea how she's going to hide all of the house's oddities from her.
I loved this. Margaret and Katherine essentially existed in two different genres - Margaret was in a horror novel that she insisted on treating like cozy fantasy, and Katherine was in a domestic thriller/mystery. Particularly during the first half of the book, I had lots of fun with Margaret's unhinged daily life and POV. To her, the house's haunted state was not a problem, simply a series of rules she had to follow along with one unpleasant month she just needed to endure. Sure, little Elias occasionally tried to bite, but he was fine as long as you never invaded his personal space. Yes, the walls tended to bleed in September, but the blood would disappear on its own eventually. Many of the resident ghosts had distressing physical appearances, but once you got used to them they weren't so bad. In fact, Fredericka was downright useful.
Katherine, meanwhile, had a complicated relationship with her parents, particularly her father, which was part of the reason why she hadn't noticed anything strange going on with them for the past few years. Even she, however, was taken aback by her mother's non-reaction to Hal apparently going missing. From Margaret's POV, readers knew Hal was probably holed up in a hotel somewhere, but it was still fun watching Katherine try to investigate her family's mystery while her mother frantically cleaned up evidence of ghosts.
As readers learned more about both Katherine and Margaret's family history and the history of what happened in Margaret's house, things took a darker turn. I was pretty much glued to the book, wanting to see how things would turn out. I have a feeling the ending was likely one of the most difficult parts for the author to write - readers were given two possible ways the book could have ended, and the one the author settled on was maybe the least believable. That said, I didn't dislike how things turned out.
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