I Want To Go Home But I'm Already There - Róisín Lanigan
I received an advanced reading copy of this book via NetGalley.
The haunted house as a metaphor for grief, or abuse, or mental illness, or anything else, is really nothing new, and for people who read and watch a lot of horror I think it’s become a little stale at this point. It would be easy to lump I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There into that category and to dismiss it as a result of that, but I think there’s a lot more going on here and that would be a real shame.
The first thing to say about I Want To Go Home… is that it’s brilliantly written. The characters feel like people I know and have known, and it’s very keenly observed. It taps into a very specific generational issue around housing insecurity that I’d guess anybody younger than 40 in the UK has suffered through, and a lot of the time I felt like I was reading a biography of my own life. It’s often laugh-out-loud funny, and that does a great job of making the creeping dread that slowly builds over the course of the year in which we follow our protagonists feel even more impactful.
I suspect that a common criticism of this book will come from people who went in expecting a horror novel and got a piece of literary fiction. I’d argue that it is still a horror novel, but the supernatural element - the haunting - takes a back seat to the much more mundane horrors of being a Millennial (or maybe even Gen Z at this point) trying to live in London and maintain any sort of quality of life.
Personally, I liked the fact that the haunting is subtle and largely ambiguous. While you could certainly read this as a metaphor for mental health issues, the doubt that this ambiguity creates - is the haunting real? is it all in Áine’s head? - brought a depth to the novel that I really appreciated. At one point in the novel Áine reflects on the time that she took her boyfriend to Ireland to meet her parents, and how he reacted with scorn and amusement to the stories of the banshees that have plagued her family. She tells him that he isn’t a believer. She is. The ambiguity of the haunting is asking us to decide whether we’re non-believers like Elliot, or whether we see ourselves in Áine.
I really enjoyed this and would absolutely recommend picking it up.