Meditations on the ways grief is felt and harvested—the funny, the sorrowful, the surreal, and the unmentionable
Winner of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize
The stories in My Haunted Home delve in startling ways into the lives of the obsessed, the grieving, and the truly haunted. Victoria Hood conjures a shifting range of narrators through an unstable range of worlds where mothers might be dead, girls compulsively shove peanuts inside their ears, agoraphobia traps people inside their houses, and cats won’t eat your soup. In “The Teeth, the Way I Smile,” a daughter who looks like her dead mother manifests grief both in her house and her body. In “Smelly Smelly,” a woman slowly comes to realize her boyfriend has been dead for weeks. In “You, Your Fault,” we explore the unfolding love of two women who love every part of each other—including the parts that fixate on arson and murder.
Each story is a bite-size piece of haunting candy on a necklace of obsession holding them together. Hood probes the worlds of what can be haunted, unpacking the ways in which hauntings can be manifested in physical forms, mentally harvested and lived through, and even a change in what is haunting.
Winner of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize
The stories in My Haunted Home delve in startling ways into the lives of the obsessed, the grieving, and the truly haunted. Victoria Hood conjures a shifting range of narrators through an unstable range of worlds where mothers might be dead, girls compulsively shove peanuts inside their ears, agoraphobia traps people inside their houses, and cats won’t eat your soup. In “The Teeth, the Way I Smile,” a daughter who looks like her dead mother manifests grief both in her house and her body. In “Smelly Smelly,” a woman slowly comes to realize her boyfriend has been dead for weeks. In “You, Your Fault,” we explore the unfolding love of two women who love every part of each other—including the parts that fixate on arson and murder.
Each story is a bite-size piece of haunting candy on a necklace of obsession holding them together. Hood probes the worlds of what can be haunted, unpacking the ways in which hauntings can be manifested in physical forms, mentally harvested and lived through, and even a change in what is haunting.
These are stories about death, about grieving, about obsession and loss. But they’re also language-rich, experimental, strange, brilliant, and compulsively readable. I have never enjoyed being haunted as much as I did reading this amazing debut!’
—Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You; Stories and Other Revenges
Victoria Hood strives to create work that can meld together the punk roots her parents raised her in with the disillusionment of losing her mother at a young age. Through her writing she hopes to discomfort, humor, and charm. She is author of the chapbooks Death and Darlings and I Am My Mother's Disappointments.
