Whisper House Press

Book: Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread

Author: Leila Taylor

Publisher: Repeater

ISBN: 9781915672643

Publication Date: February 11, 2025

Capone’s Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ of 5⭐

Part analysis, part polemic, and part memoir, Sick Houses balances as a (haunted?) stool on three legs, and Leila Taylor’s work is worth your attention. Chapters are arranged topically (e.g. Brutal Houses, Witch Houses, Mad Houses, Forever Houses), and the tone is largely informal rather than academic. At a brisk 240 pages, this cultural history of hauntings, infestations, and traumas offers a brief overview of the role houses—literally in terms of their shapes, sizes, and designs; metaphorically in terms of their emotional baggage and psychic experiences—in American horror over the years.

The aforementioned informal tone works to this book’s advantage, as it kept me swimming along enjoying the tour where a more formal tone would have stopped me—a pleasure reading curioso—from carrying on. It works to the book’s advantage when Taylor connects her personal perspective to an introduction to the section on witch houses: “Perhaps my affinity for decay is due to my having grown up in Detroit in the 80s, so decrepit Victorian mansions were part of my natural landscape. Perhaps it’s also that I prefer, for the most part, to be left alone.” Relatable, right? Even more insightful are Taylor’s social observations: “If [a house were] a woman,” Taylor writes, “[…] its human proxy would be […] a certain type of woman we have been taught to fear, pity, and avoid becoming at all cost: post-menopausal, living alone, and abandoned by society long ago; the ‘crazy cat lady’; the Miss Havishams, the Norma Desmonds, the Blanch and ‘Baby’ Jane Hudsons’.” In particular, Taylor’s analysis of witch houses and what they represent (in essence: women who don’t submit themselves to the patriarchal expectations to which our society still clings) is poignant. This work moves beyond simple analysis and identifies connections between our behaviors and those of our forebears in Salem and unmerry old England.

This reader loves stories from Cold War America, so the bit about bomb shelters in the “Forever Houses” chapter was fascinating. Taylor observes: “Just as homeownership was marketed toward a specific American family portrait, so were bomb shelters. The Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization explicitly targeted suburban, white, middle-class families with a working father, a mother at home, and a few kinds. If America was going to survive through a nuclear holocaust, they wanted to make sure the ones who made it out alive were the right sort of people.” True horror, indeed, is best found in real life. No supernatural forces needed. Tying this kind of house to the Twilight Zone episode “The Shelter” (1961) was apropos, and Taylor didn’t miss the opportunity to discuss one of my favorite episodes of television.
The book’s strengths also contribute to its few shortcomings—that the book didn’t seem to know which it wanted to be: an analysis, a polemic, or a memoir. That lack of focus had an impact, as in we get little more than name checking, as in the case of “The Shelter”—without a deep dive. But it’s hard to hold that fact too much against Leila Taylor’s Sick Houses, as the speed of the narrative is what allows the author to cover so much ground in so little space, and this book isn’t a stand-in for a graduate course on the subject. Taylor does provide food for thought and a list of books and movies for my TBR/TBW list, and I’m glad for the short time I spent with the author and their subject.