In August, Raw Dog Screaming Press (RDSP) launched their new line of novellas where “no niche is too niche,” seeking “dark speculative fiction… presented in unique voices – stories told through the lenses only these creators have access to, distinctive tales, borne exclusively from the creator’s particular expertise.” United under the series title: Selected Papers from the Consortium for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena, the novella line is being edited by Bram Stoker Award nominated academic/writer RJ Joseph.
Bleak Houses, by Kate Maruyama, represents the debut of this line, consisting of two novella-length stories: Safer and Family Solstice. The small independent press Omnium Gatherum previously published Family Solstice in 2021, when Rue Morgue Magazine named it Best Fiction Book of the year. The release of Bleak Houses by RDSP thus represents an opportunity for new readers to discover that story while also being treated to another previously unpublished story born from the horrors of pandemic isolation.
In Safer, college student Soledad looks for work during the pandemic lockdown, both for needed money and even more for an escape from isolation at home with its tedious routine and inactivity. The opportunity to be the live-in nanny for the young son of an A-list Hollywood celebrity and his wife seems to fit Soledad’s needs perfectly. The pay is fantastic, the house a luxurious gothic wonder with its own gatehouse apartment for Soledad. And she makes an instant connection with the young boy, Story. Though the celebrity and his wife seem to have some Hollywood eccentricities, Soledad can understand their desire for familial privacy, and is particularly appreciative of their pandemic vigilance of masking and ensuring vaccination of anyone working in their home.
But slowly, things begin to put Soledad increasingly at unease. The celebrity father’s behavior, the mother’s near obsessive fears, the couple’s arguments, ghostly animalistic cries in the night, an imaginary friend named Mrs. Wolf with whom Story seems to converse, and an emotional woman Soledad and Story encounter while on walks outside for fresh air and exercise.
I adore the themes of Safer, the feelings of dread and horror present in our human lives that the pandemic did not evoke as much as exaggerate. As the title suggests, Maruyama turns toward the matter of what people do to achieve a sense of safety from their dread, from the perceived threats surrounding them and theirs. Each character of the novella is driven by this pursuit of feeling safer, but to varying degrees of selfishness, and in opposite pursuit of a home.
Soledad’s life has been taken over by the pandemic, placed into a sense of detachment, retreating into life at her house with her mother to avoid the herds of unvaccinated and unmasked bustling about LA as if nothing is wrong, nothing in the world has changed. But for all her fears of, and preoccupation with, infection, Soledad also recognizes something damaging in what her life of isolation has become. So she seeks out an escape from her home: a calculated risk. And she discovers that her pursuit of safety doesn’t apply to just to herself and her mother, but to this boy Story she has now met and gotten to know.
Meanwhile, Story’s parents remain hunkered down in their own home, unwilling to risk anything for their own safety and their own desires. Maruyama paints them as not merely desiring safety, but feeling entitled to safety due to their celebrity status or affluence. If they need something to help assuage their dread, or remove threats to their contentment, then by right it should be theirs. And they should be able to take it.
While Safer succeeds tremendously at developing its overarching theme in meaningful ways and creating compelling characters, its merits do become lessened with a predictable plot and overly telegraphed twists of the family’s secrets. Additionally, while it may just be a matter of personal preference, I do wish the novella had more fully teased out its supernatural aspects and gothic elements – made the paranormal additions more integral.
Family Solstice is the stronger of the two stories in terms of its plot and surprise revelations. The second novella of Bleak Houses also puts its folk gothic horror atmosphere to better use than the genre touches of Safer. Shea Massey is about to turn 13 and the winter solstice of that year approaches. And with that momentous occasion comes her full initiation into family secrets and duty. Like her older siblings, she has trained to descend into the basement of their old home to fight against some force unknown. Before this rite, her family won’t divulge to Shea the nature of what she fights, or even the details of exactly why. But, Shea has seen the way it has changed her siblings after the solstices when they turned 13. And she sees the trepidation and fear in her parent’s eyes, and their reluctance to talk about her older brother who left home, or hostile refusal to be reminded of their first-born son, whose past existence Shea only knows from a photograph. Maruyama finds success with the pacing and mystery of Family Solstice, while also making its theme of family sins resonate.
Despite vast differences in tone and style, both Safer and Family Solstice share a large degree in their makeup. Both deal with familial wrongs that involve actions taken, born from a selfish sense of entitlement, to ensure safety and happiness. They each offer these themes as commentary both at the level of the individual characters and on society, or the United States at large. The “bleak houses” of each could be thought of on the level of the physical land and buildings that bear haunting, or the grim state of people there, consumed and enslaved to their selfish systems. Against such darkness Maruyama sets her protagonists, fierce heroines who decide to step away from, and stand against, the horror.
