A review by sleepingwtlo
Bleak Houses by Kate Maruyama

dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

4.0

 
Safer: In a locked down Los Angeles, Soledad takes a new job as an au pair for a celebrity couple and their child Story. The parents are high maintenance and the house has its fair share of actual ghosts, but its worth it - the money’s good, she’s safe from COVID, and Story is a delight.But a series of strange occurrences, and an unsettling encounter with a stranger leave Soledad certain that Story’s parents are hiding something huge…

Family Solstice: Shea is in training. For what, she doesn’t know. But she’s the last of the Masseys to undertake the family tradition and head into the basement on the Solstice.Forbidden to share the truth of what happened when each of them descended beneath the house, Shea’s siblings can’t say a word to prepare her. And even if they could, what Shea finds down there will see the teenager face an impossible choice.

The first in the Selected Papers from the Consortium for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena series, Kate Maruyama’s Bleak Houses showcases two very different homes haunted in very different ways.

Safer was an engaging read, with its lockdown setting and reminder that the living pose far more dangers than the dead. That’s not to say it’s light on the scares - Maruyama strikes a great balance between the ghosts that haunt Soledad’s new residence, and the dark truth that haunts the family that lives there. A lot is packed into its short page count, including a genuinely quite thrilling final chase.

But of the two stories, Family Solstice was the one for me. Maruyama builds the lore of Shea’s family so beautifully, and the tale itself has twists and turns galore as we - and Shea - discover the truth of what lives in the Massey’s basement. Family Solstice is generational trauma made manifest; an ancient, manipulative evil that no family member is exempt from.

Fans of short horror stories would do well to keep an eye on this ongoing series from Raw Dog Screaming Press.