The Haunted House

by Rebecca Brown

Overview

Long out of print, Rebecca Brown’s brilliant debut novel explores the psychic repercussions of growing up in an alcoholic family, and the ways in which one woman’s past continues to inform and inhabit her life. Robin Daley’s childhood is dominated by a sense of impermanence: Her hard-drinking father disappears as suddenly and unexpectedly as he arrives. Her adulthood offers an escape, but strange things happen when the dark corners and locked rooms of family life are revealed.

Rebecca Brown is the author of The Gifts of the Body, The Last Time I Saw You, and The End of Youth. She lives in Seattle.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780872868502
Publisher:	City Lights Books
Publication date:	03/03/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	992 KB

About the Author

Rebecca Brown is the author of The Terrible Girls, Annie Oakley's Girl, The Gifts of the Body, and The Dogs. She lives in Seattle.

Editorial Reviews

In one stifling moment near the beginning of this strong, evocative first novel, its genesis is laid bare: little Robin Dale's father slides her into a pool, steps away and, moving backward, hands outstretched, says, ``Try to reach me.'' Robin spends the rest of her life trying to grab hold of her father, a Navy pilot who moves his family from one small-town airbase to another every few years, while he flies off to cities with exotic names and plenty of bars. When drinking loses him his job, he sits at home, for once, filling Robin's head with tales of his heroism, turning her into his copilot. But he drifts away again, and Robin is left with her mother and small brother. After high school, she wins a scholarship to study abroad. When she comes home, it is to a transformed and unreachable mother, now a movie star who goes on location to far-away places, where Robin follows, never quite catching up. Finally Robin settles down with her lover, Carrie. But bizarre events occur in the house that they are restoring. At the novel's close, Robin is in the pool again, reaching for her father, drowning in the haunted house of memory. (January)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Here is a real new voice--ripe and imaginative, often funny, and sliding craftily between fact and fantasy.

London Times

Exceptionally well written.
—Carol Seajay

Feminist Bookstore News

Through a lyrical weaving of fantasy and childhood memory, narrator Robin Daley considers the contradictions between her material existence and unmet needs. Given her transient childhood and distant family relationshipsher father finally abandoned his wife and childrenshe is prone to question the very concept of identity. Robin's search for a sense of self is continually frustrated, as even the Victorian house she and her lesbian lover are restoring violates her need for permanence by flooding mysteriously from the floorboards. The most transparent moments of her surreal dialogue may still be fragmentary and fleeting, but they represent reality as she perceives it. Here, fluid language becomes the post-modern truth of subjectivity. For larger collections.Mollie Brodsky, English Dept., Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.

Library Journal