The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own by Gwendolyn Kiste
Raw Dog Screaming Press (April 14, 2026)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Broadbent
Raw Dog Screaming Press releases another banger with Gwendolyn Kiste’s The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own. Containing the Bram Stoker Award-winning “The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt from Lucy Westerna’s Diary),” it’s a feminist howl of a collection that takes a hard look at the ways family and society can trap women.
The collection has coherent themes: feminism, beauty in chaos, triumph in apocalypse. Haunted Houses is a more tightly drawn collection than most, holding a melody while variations rise and fade. Love and hate twin; acceptance forms holiness from ashes; obsession leads to transcendence and heartbreak. There’s plenty of trauma in this book — most from abusive families (Kiste can delineate a scapegoat in heartbreaking detail and clarity). But there’s also sisterhood, as well as plenty of queer love.
With this collection, Kiste opens possibilities in modern horror. Two stories are riffs on other tales (Dracula in “The Eight People …” and Julius Caesar in “Ides”); several turn familiar tropes of their heads: the scream queen, the horror director, the murdered girl. Rasputin shows up in “The Mad Monk of Motor City,” and Marie Antoinette in “Lost in Darkness and Distance” (among other people, but I won’t ruin the story). Dali makes a cameo in “The Sea Witch of the World’s Fair.” Kiste includes two stories of art taken too far, and two of apocalypse — none of which end anywhere I expected.
But that’s the beauty in these stories. Dreamy, almost surreal, they wind up in places you never imagined. There’s strangeness here, but plenty of beauty; these days, any feminist collection is bound to bring the horror, and Kiste does that, too. These stories hurt. But they balance that pain with beauty, even if it comes in the midst of devastation.
All horror is political, and Kiste’s book is more political than most. From the first story (and my favorite), “A New Mother’s Guide to Raising an Abomination,” Kiste examines the many forces which constrain and constrict women’s lives: judgment, objectification, abuse. Those are heavy subjects, and while the topics might be brutal, Kiste pulls this off without crushing your soul. Instead, there’s hope here, no matter how grim the circumstances.
The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own opens the possibilities of the horror genre as a whole. Writers should take note. Kiste could teach a masterclass in the use of the second person alone. An unforgettable collection, and one which reminds us that there’s hope. Much-needed.
