Here's a very unusual horror novel that I appreciated very much. Its flaws are less things that are demonstrably done wrong and more genre conventions that aren't followed. Perhaps they are done wrong, as Del Sandeen is a debut novelist, but perhaps she merely chose to approach this from the perspective of character and experience rather than language and location. That may turn some people off but doesn't have to be invalid. It's exactly the sort of thing that could spur healthy discussion at a book club.

It's a southern gothic novel, but one in which the vast majority of characters are black, to some degree, at least, a decision which sits at the heart of the story. Some are obviously black and in the terminology of the time—we're in the U.S. in 1962—consider themselves "Negroes". Others have black heritage and consider themselves "colored", already an outdated term for reasons I will soon get to, but look entirely white. Some of them are also racist against Negroes, even as they talk up their black heritage within their family and passing for white outside it. The story is inherently woven into history and that involves both slaves and slave owners.

As you might imagine, Del Sandeen's goal is to look at the experience of black people in the U.S. within the genre framework of a southern gothic novel, by moving a black woman from Chicago to New Orleans against a backdrop of civil rights. Her journey is short in page count but telling, because a "Colored" sign is hung on her carriage when her train reaches a particular point. The moment is important because the novel unfolds almost entirely inside the cursed house of the title, which means that whatever else is happening outside in the world seems to be a long way away.

This black woman is Jemma Baker and she's at a particularly low point in her life. Her adoptive father has recently died, leaving her without family. Her boyfriend has cheated on her, getting another woman pregnant. That led her into depression and a failed suicide attempt prompted a brief stay in hospital. All that took her job as a teacher. So, when a convenient letter arrives to offer her a job in New Orleans at three-times her old salary, she leaps at it and rides that train south to the Duchon Plantation, where she's surprised to not find a child in need of a tutor.

Instead she finds a very strange family, the Duchons, none of whom have left their house for as long as she's been alive and she's now twenty-seven. And I don't mean that as a generality. It's pretty exact as timeframes go. What's more, a Duchon family member dies every seven years, always on 12th March, which just happens to be her birthday. Clearly she's part of this story in a much deeper way than merely being hired. The house and its occupants are full of secrets and a number of those secrets involve her. The one detail that surely can't count as a secret, though it's revealed like one, is that the house, as telegraphed in the title, is cursed. Jemma's job isn't to teach anyone anything. It's to remove that curse.

I would love to dive into some of those secrets but that's as far as the jacket blurb goes so I'll be fair and follow suit so you can discover them for yourself. What I will point out is that Sandeen keeps them coming. The initial batch of revelations arrive between pages fifty and seventy, so relatively early in a three hundred and seventy page novel. That's when the curse of the title is raised and the reasons behind those stunning conveniences are revealed. In short, they're not stunning conveniences in the slightest. Everything that happens here is very deliberate.

So, without being able to talk about a dozen revelations I dearly want to talk about, I'll focus on what Sandeen does here and what she doesn't do. For one, she only partially embraces the idea of the southern gothic. The setting is a quintessential southern gothic location, a plantation in Louisiana, populated by an old family with the tough as nails Honorine its current matriarch. It ought to simply exude atmosphere but it doesn't, because Sandeen doesn't adopt the typically highly descriptive language of the genre and the plantation, for the most part, is just a house. It doesn't ever feel like it's a character of its own, as so many gothic mansions do.

Instead, Sandeen builds experience through character. Honorine has her quirks and it shouldn't shock anyone that she has particularly nasty secrets. Her children, Russell and Simone, are the least characterful of the bunch, Russell lost in his mother's shadow and Simone a simple bigot, one who it's easy to hate. Simone's children, Fosette and Laurence, however, have more depth. They're old enough to have picked up the bad habits of the family and are often clear bad guys but are young enough to have been affected by something that isn't their fault and so show an occasional glimpse of humanity that allows us and Jemma to feel a level of sympathy for them.

Even though the house doesn't serve as another character, it does serve as a prison. We've all seen TV shows and movies that highlight how active plantations were, not just through people working them but through all the grand balls and social occasions that are held there. They're inherently busy places with people constantly coming and going. The Duchon Plantation hasn't even got an echo of that. The family simply abide, never once leaving the grounds. Dennis, the gardener, brings them what they need from town. A priest visits once a month. Jemma may be the first other person to arrive in twenty-seven years.

And that makes the place rather stifling. We all went through the COVID-19 pandemic not that long ago now, so we should be able to remember lockdown, when most of us remained at home for months on end, everything else cancelled for the duration. Imagine that stretched out for a period not far short of three decades! And, while the Duchons do have a television and a decent library, they don't have the internet. However large their plantation house and the estate that it sits in, it's a tiny static bubble in an ever-expanding world in which they play no part. Yes, that leads to incest, because of course it does. I'll spoil that minor detail. It also leads to madness, a staple of gothic novels wherever they're set, but how much of the madness we see truly counts as madness and how much good old-fashioned racism?

Of course, Jemma learns a lot about the Duchons as each successive secret topples and she also learns a lot about herself and how she ties to them. Eventually, of course, she learns a lot about their history because that's a prison for them as much as the house. I'm not sure I buy into what Sandeen provides as keys, not because it isn't appropriate because it is, but because it's so easy to see this story as a much bigger story in miniature. If this  one family can be compared to the United States and the situation they've found themselves in compared to its systematic racism, then the solution provided ought to scale up to address that too. I don't buy into that.

And that's about as much as I can say. There are other characters in play, but I can't talk about any of them or how they connect. There are other stories in play within the larger one, but they would absolutely count as spoilers. Let's just say that they're all worthy. The characters are all there for reasons and the stories even more so. It shouldn't surprise that they get brutal, given both that we're talking about slavery and racism in the American south and that we're doing so within the pages of a horror novel. However, they never feel exploitative. They feel real.

The main reason I appreciated this novel is that it brings something new to the southern gothic genre. The biggest problems I had with it are that it doesn't do all the things that we expect to see in a southern gothic novel. Those two things really don't sit too well together. It's great for doing what we don't expect but it's not for not doing what we do. That strikes me as unfair. I'm eager to see what Del Sandeen writes next. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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