Three years ago, three friends broke into an abandoned house. A house haunted by fascism, a house that was fascism. What happened inside has transformed them all. Alice, a trans woman, is incessantly visited by ghosts as she drifts dissociated through a hollow life. Ila, once Alice's best friend, has become a minor celebrity among TERFs, but is uncomfortably aware of the way her new community tokenizes her Jewish and Pakistani identities. Hannah, the third of them, never came out at all. And always the House is there, waiting, looming, reassuring, threatening, promising, hating. There are words I want to attach to the experience of reading this book. Gruelling. Harrowing. Not because it is a slog - rather, the prose flies - but because of its subject matter and, perhaps more importantly, Rumfitt's skill in manifesting an atmosphere of oppression, in inhabiting the minds and bodies of the protagonists as they exist within that atmosphere, in pushing the reader on through misery ...
Discussion of horror and whatever else takes my fancy.