I want to go home but I am already there by Róisín Lanigan Review – A history of a ghost of housing crisis | Fiction

TOa certain extent, all the rented properties are haunted. The spectra of previous tenants hide in the bedside tables and the slogan cups they have left; Their faded smoke persists in the carpets; The position they failed to redirect the batteries in the corridor. Neighbors can also feel like ghosts: we could rarely see them, but we hear their steps and their music, inhale their cooking smells, or simply feel their presence recently died on the communal stairs. As for the owners: they are probably the largest ghouls of all.

In light of all this, it may be surprising that we have not seen more stories of ghosts of housing crisis, or, like the beginnings of Róisín Lanigan were billed, a “Gothic novel for the generation of Back”. I want to go home but I am already there, the story of Áine and Elliot, who has just moved to a rental together in a killing region of London. It is a dish that remains, no one else seemed to want. They are both eager to enter a more adult stage of life, but something about the place takes place from the start.

It is a familiar premise, although given a new rotation. Lanigan is an ironic observer and full of mind of what it feels like to live now, and some sentences are a delight (“She finished petizz and put the garland in their recycling bin and thought how long it would take before he disintegrated in the ground. Perhaps never, in fact”).

She also knows her Gothic tropes. Here, we have a female protagonist whose instincts tell him that something is off but, as usual, his male partner rejects her: “He said that the apartment was just old, that he gave the flat character, that it was a silly thing that she is afraid”. Is it this old enigma: ghost or mental illness? And so Áine begins to keep the things of Elliot, withdrawing in her when she is becoming more and more afraid (“she knew not to tell him that it was not good, how much everything is dead here”).

Lanigan creates a truly strange feeling of terror, and although she deploys clichés, she does it in a tone by glazing on the sarcastic: “Often, she opened her eyes to see a silhouette standing at the end of the wrought iron bed until she realizes in the dark, and she would be embarrassed in fear for a few minutes until she is carried out in darkness, probably. There are places where I laughed aloud, as when she describes her owner as “him, or she, the anonymous Gombeen spectral which sucked all their capital”.

As its use of “Gombeen” indicates, Lanigan is Irish, and its talent to explore the cultural dislocation Áine feels this novel. He manifests himself in all kinds of ways, his friends being more frightened by the death “than normal” because they have not seen enough corpses, to parents who have extinguished bowls of salt for the spirits. Originally from a superstitious family myself, I hate Elliot and how he laughs at his parents for their really frightening band story. His skepticism is not the problem, it is the classist and xenophobic way in which he deploys it that makes you believe in our heroine.

There is a lot to love in this book: its humor, its use of mold (there is not enough mold in fiction) and its themes of inequality (the respiratory problems of childhood of Áine are relevant). It is a brilliant satire of the horrible London housing market. He also has faults. Sometimes he groaned; And I saw the twist – if you can call it – a mile. I felt that Lanigan was wary of stretching our suspension of disbelief too far, and therefore it deprives us of a terrifying culminating point, or explanation. But I may just be too addicted to the Uncanny podcast, and therefore the answers that are desired where there is none.

Despite these reservations, the book remained with me: it became under my skin in a way that made me tremble. Beyond the paranormal mystery, Lanigan is more interested in exploring the psychic assessment that the rental takes, after “years of existing on the furniture of others, of dip in their stories and their anxieties”, and the sense of the house for those who can never have theirs – the very real sadness of this fact. Above all, this novel relates to the decline of spirituality, and where this generation of young adults could locate God, or the devil, in his absence.