Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread
repeater
Horror begins at home… From family homes in Amityville to Gothic mansions in Los Angeles and the Unabomber’s cabin, houses often capture and contain the horror that has happened within them.
Sick Houses crosses the threshold of these eerie spaces to explore how different types of architecture become vessels for terror and how these spaces, meant to shelter us, instead become the source of our deepest fears. Using film, television, and literature to explain why we are drawn to haunted and haunting places, Sick Houses is a must read for anyone who has ever looked at a house and sensed there might be something unsettling going on inside.
Praise for sick houses
Leila Taylor is one of my favorite thinkers, so I am always thrilled whenever I get to skulk around in her sublime brain for a bit. The connections she makes between pop culture, the supernatural, and the psyche are utterly thrilling, and she does it with such deftness and insight it takes my breath away. Sick Houses is a captivating, exhilarating examination of uncanny dwellings, both real and imaginary. It's a book that filled me with deep terror and wondrous delight. It made me gasp and laugh and make weird, wooly lists of road trips to take, films to watch, and historical events to revisit. Most of all, it made me rethink the spaces we occupy, and the apparitions of all sorts that live alongside us. I hope it haunts me for the rest of my days. - Pam Grossman, The Witch Wave podcast
A thoughtful, personal, incisive and well-considered premise that will appeal to horror enthusiasts and storytellers alike, Sick Houses asks us to examine the universally relatable concept of home and how horror can intimately overturn the places in which we most seek and hope for safety. Engaging and conceptually haunting, Taylor’s inviting style chills at one turn and charms with wit in the next, the book proving an immersive travelogue across a wide-ranging ‘collection’ of haunted households. This book will linger in my thoughts long after I’ve left its doorstep, and I’ll be thinking about it before I cross future thresholds.” - Leanna Renee Hieber, award-winning co-author of A Haunted History of Invisible Women and America’s Most Gothic
Reviews & Mentions
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”Taylor’s inquisitive mind takes readers on a journey through seven house categories: American Houses, Brutal Houses, Witch Houses, Mad Houses, Little Houses, Forever Houses and My House. She gives readers a tour of the frightening architectural fare that falls under each classification and also unpacks the cultural reasons these types of buildings have a hold on our imaginations.” —New York Times
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