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My Haunted Home: Stories
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.
- GenresHorrorShort Stories
148 pages, Paperback
Published October 4, 2022
3 people are currently reading
164 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 27, 2024
Great stories/prose. I like the creep factor and how it relates to death, especially with death close to you. There are some that reminded me of my own haunted home.
August 2, 2024
“I like the smell of rubbing alcohol, but I’m not an alcoholic. Sometimes I like to give myself papercuts and bathe in it so I can be the burn and the calm and also the adrenaline. Sometimes it makes me cum,” Victoria Hood writes in “Stitches and Shells,” one of the 38 bite-size stories in her collection My Haunted Home, winner of the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest in 2021.
In "Stitches and Shells," the stories blend the narrator and the author, the dead and the living, the home and the world, and the body and the horror. This connection is strengthened by the use of the second person in Part II, drawing the reader into the narrative: “Your throat lubricates itself, the warm liquids becoming your liquids, you mixing yourself into the teacup, you becoming the sugar, the milk, you becoming the sweetness, the hotness, the cool melody of black tea.”
In My Haunted Home, drinking a cup of tea isn’t just a simple act; it’s a full-bodied experience that deserves scrutinization under a microscope, an act that involves the lubrication of the throat, and the tea becoming bodily fluids, bodily fluids becoming tea, the pouring out of oneself into the teacup. In My Haunted Home, everything is always more than it seems, more than itself. Living in a house with one’s boyfriend and working from home isn’t just a semi-paranoid, semi-agoraphobic existence, it’s the whole world, it’s a vast landscape of interplay among your ghoulish imagination, your childhood self, your dead relatives and all the curly horrors hiding deep in the dark recesses of your mind. The home becomes the afterworld and the afterworld becomes the home: “The monsters have taken control of my house, of me.”
To read the rest of my review, please see Issue 2, Volume 2, BURN-N-OUT, of BTWN Magazine: https://www.btwnmagazine.ca/product-p...
In "Stitches and Shells," the stories blend the narrator and the author, the dead and the living, the home and the world, and the body and the horror. This connection is strengthened by the use of the second person in Part II, drawing the reader into the narrative: “Your throat lubricates itself, the warm liquids becoming your liquids, you mixing yourself into the teacup, you becoming the sugar, the milk, you becoming the sweetness, the hotness, the cool melody of black tea.”
In My Haunted Home, drinking a cup of tea isn’t just a simple act; it’s a full-bodied experience that deserves scrutinization under a microscope, an act that involves the lubrication of the throat, and the tea becoming bodily fluids, bodily fluids becoming tea, the pouring out of oneself into the teacup. In My Haunted Home, everything is always more than it seems, more than itself. Living in a house with one’s boyfriend and working from home isn’t just a semi-paranoid, semi-agoraphobic existence, it’s the whole world, it’s a vast landscape of interplay among your ghoulish imagination, your childhood self, your dead relatives and all the curly horrors hiding deep in the dark recesses of your mind. The home becomes the afterworld and the afterworld becomes the home: “The monsters have taken control of my house, of me.”
To read the rest of my review, please see Issue 2, Volume 2, BURN-N-OUT, of BTWN Magazine: https://www.btwnmagazine.ca/product-p...
October 10, 2023
The dedication read, “For my dead mom and alive dad” and I was hooked.
On the first day of October— in the most uncharacteristic day of fall at 80 degrees and sunny— I went to the first ever Maine Book Fest and got to meet some amazing authors. One of them was the lovely & talented Tori Hood!
When I tell you this book gripped me and did not let go until I was finished, I mean it. I found myself reading a story, written in her wonderful almost-stream-of-consciousness style, and interpreting it through my own feelings and experiences. I related to the narrator a lot in some ways and the way in which grief and mental health and going about life are portrayed are truly unmatched. My favorite stories were MY Body, The Election and My Haunted Home.
Pick this one up if you have the chance and support a Maine spooky author!
On the first day of October— in the most uncharacteristic day of fall at 80 degrees and sunny— I went to the first ever Maine Book Fest and got to meet some amazing authors. One of them was the lovely & talented Tori Hood!
When I tell you this book gripped me and did not let go until I was finished, I mean it. I found myself reading a story, written in her wonderful almost-stream-of-consciousness style, and interpreting it through my own feelings and experiences. I related to the narrator a lot in some ways and the way in which grief and mental health and going about life are portrayed are truly unmatched. My favorite stories were MY Body, The Election and My Haunted Home.
Pick this one up if you have the chance and support a Maine spooky author!
March 4, 2023
Although presented as a short story collection, My Haunted Home can also be read as a novel consisting of snippets of an unhappy, morbid, and claustrophobic life, beginning with the first story, “The Teeth, the Way I Smile,” which sets the tone for the rest. In “The Teeth,” the narrator sees her dead mother in various parts of her own body whenever she looks into the mirror. But by turning on the bathroom light, she imagines that the mirror yanks her mother from her grave, bringing her unhappiness with her. From there we go to “I Like It,” whose narrator enjoys (at least fantasizing about) cannibalizing herself (extracting the unhappy spirit of the dead mother?). There are ghosts here, too, reminders of her unhappy history.
But the stories may also be read as exercises in morbid fantasy—a woman’s arms grow to snake-like lengths, another’s legs refuse to act as her mind commands, another cuts herself to either drain her body of blood and bad spirits or to allow spirits to enter her body. Sex tends to occur in locations that are public and flagrant or private and humiliating.
Part II Home consists solely of the short story “You, Your Fault,” which at 15 pages is also the longest in the book. The narrative voice switches from the first- person singular “I” of Part I (a relief after so much of the emotionally draining effects of its solipsistic “I”) to the second-person singular “you,” a move which presumably acts to put the reader in the narrator’s position to achieve an emotional immediacy unavailable via, say, omniscient third-person narration. The move to greater immediacy, including use of the present tense, however, is undercut by a lack of narrative describing an emotional reaction to anything described. Emotions are named but not discussed, and actions are listed as matter-of-fact instances of affectless behaviors. Hard to get close to such narrators or feel a compulsion to see what happens next. Is this numbness the literature of autism?
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
But the stories may also be read as exercises in morbid fantasy—a woman’s arms grow to snake-like lengths, another’s legs refuse to act as her mind commands, another cuts herself to either drain her body of blood and bad spirits or to allow spirits to enter her body. Sex tends to occur in locations that are public and flagrant or private and humiliating.
Part II Home consists solely of the short story “You, Your Fault,” which at 15 pages is also the longest in the book. The narrative voice switches from the first- person singular “I” of Part I (a relief after so much of the emotionally draining effects of its solipsistic “I”) to the second-person singular “you,” a move which presumably acts to put the reader in the narrator’s position to achieve an emotional immediacy unavailable via, say, omniscient third-person narration. The move to greater immediacy, including use of the present tense, however, is undercut by a lack of narrative describing an emotional reaction to anything described. Emotions are named but not discussed, and actions are listed as matter-of-fact instances of affectless behaviors. Hard to get close to such narrators or feel a compulsion to see what happens next. Is this numbness the literature of autism?
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
December 15, 2022
I love this book and I love the author! She is an incredibly talented writer. The stories can make you feel so many things and reactions can range from making you laugh to making you cringe (in a good way!). A strong recommend!
July 30, 2022
Very nice prose and imagery. It has its weird spooky moments and has a surrealist feel
April 20, 2024
A perfect collection of stories about grief and/or being weird
April 17, 2024
Victoria Hood is haunted. There are, broadly speaking, two “times” of the human experience: there’s the objective time of clocks and celestial mechanics, and there’s the phenomenological time of the world as human beings naturally experience it. Ghosts exist in the space between these two times. It is a realm in which most mortal beings dare not tread except out of desperate necessity or macabre curiosity. But sometimes, living, breathing people dwell there. Tori is one of those people. She lives in the space and time of ghosts. Along with her dead mom.
Thankfully, Hood is not a selfish thinker. Instead of simply existing in this space and time absent-mindedly, she chooses to write about it, sharing her experiences with those of us who dare not step over into the other side. She accomplishes this with both an acute and critical attention to detail, and an appreciation for the disturbed and the obscene, sacrificing neither element in her vivid portrayals of the space and time of the dead. Tori offers her readers not only a lamplight through this strange realm, but, if you’re willing to accept it, a gentle guiding hand.
The stories collected in “My Haunted Home” are dreamlike, suffocated screams into the void that is life after the death of one’s mother. There are few experiences that compare to it, simultaneously a nearly-universal experience and a totally unique, alienating one. Nonetheless, the deftness and acuity with which Hood sheds light upon it demands a reaction; it demands that one turn and look. A suffocated scream, but one that manages to shout past the ghostly hand that silences it, even if for only a moment.
Victoria’s writing — to which “My Haunted Home” serves perfectly as an introduction — is stunning, mesmerizing, and tragically beautiful. I highly recommend this book for any and all explorers of the grief-stricken and the grotesque.
Thankfully, Hood is not a selfish thinker. Instead of simply existing in this space and time absent-mindedly, she chooses to write about it, sharing her experiences with those of us who dare not step over into the other side. She accomplishes this with both an acute and critical attention to detail, and an appreciation for the disturbed and the obscene, sacrificing neither element in her vivid portrayals of the space and time of the dead. Tori offers her readers not only a lamplight through this strange realm, but, if you’re willing to accept it, a gentle guiding hand.
The stories collected in “My Haunted Home” are dreamlike, suffocated screams into the void that is life after the death of one’s mother. There are few experiences that compare to it, simultaneously a nearly-universal experience and a totally unique, alienating one. Nonetheless, the deftness and acuity with which Hood sheds light upon it demands a reaction; it demands that one turn and look. A suffocated scream, but one that manages to shout past the ghostly hand that silences it, even if for only a moment.
Victoria’s writing — to which “My Haunted Home” serves perfectly as an introduction — is stunning, mesmerizing, and tragically beautiful. I highly recommend this book for any and all explorers of the grief-stricken and the grotesque.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews