Colby Wilken’s debut novel If I Stopped Haunting You is the kind of horror I love, where things are scary but not too intense. Hocus Pocus, Beetlejuice, Caspar, Little Shop of Horrors, I’m into all that “cozy horror.” I also read a ton of romance as a genre, and almost exclusively queer and/or BIPOC. What a pleasant surprise, then, that this book also hits my romance interests. Call it “horroromance” or romantic horror or whatever you want, but this book feels tailor made for me.
The story opens four months prior at a convention. Penelope Skinner and Neil Storm are on a writers’ panel talking about craft when things get heated. Pen, a biracial white and Native author who hasn’t managed to get anything published since her debut a while ago, calls out Neil, a bestselling horror author, for tokenizing his Indigenous identity and playing up stereotypes to appeal to his predominantly white audience. Unable to stop herself, Pen takes things way too far and cuts herself off from social media in embarrassment. Now, she and Neil find themselves unexpectedly trapped at a rural writers’ retreat with two close friends (and exes) Laszlo and Daniela. The Scottish castle they rented out for the week is smothered in a snowstorm, leaving them isolated and unable to leave. Both of them plan on spending their time alternately sulking about what they think the other believes about them and privately lusting after the other, but the house has plans of its own.
You see, the Scottish castle isn’t just some backwater romantic getaway. It’s also haunted by a very pissed off dead woman. As things heat up between Neil and Pen, the ghost makes herself known, and she has her sights set on our love interests. To deal with the ghost, Neil and Pen must confront their issues and clear the air, not just about how they relate to their Indigenous identities in their work but also how they feel about each other post-convention. Is there anything more to their mutual desire than sexual attraction? What are they going to do about it if there is? And why is a ghost so interested in their relationship, anyway?
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If I Stopped Haunting
In my opinion, whether or not a romance novel works depends on the love interests. Not just their romantic and sexual compatibility but everything else about them. I’m asexual and aromantic, so I tend to treat romance, both the thing real people experience and the genre itself, as fantasy fiction. Lust? Attraction? Might as well try and convince me wizards are real. I have a personal conspiracy theory that allosexuals are under some sort of mass delusion when it comes to attraction. And yet I love reading romance novels. I consume several a week, I love them so much. For me, it’s the relationship underneath the romance that I like exploring. I want to know there’s more to these characters than being hot at each other. I want to see them work through their shit until they are worth each other’s affections. I especially like flawed characters who discover whole new flaws they didn’t even know they had and who confront them anyway. Tropes are nice, but complex people finding a way to be good partners to each other is the real ticket.
If I Stopped Haunting You has all that in spades. Neil and Pen are the messiest love interests I’ve seen since I reread Talia Hibbert’s Brown Sisters series last year. They arrive at that castle thinking they have one small mess each only to realize a few days in they are both drowning in messes, some of which were created by society and colonialism but most of which are self-inflicted. It’s the classic miscommunication plot device, the “this whole thing would be resolved in two minutes if they just talked to each other” trope, but it feels natural instead of forced. I was rooting for them to sort themselves out as much as I wanted them to kiss.
In contrast, the secondary characters, particularly Laszlo and Daniela, were the weakest part of the book. They are more sketches of ideas than fully fleshed out characters. They disappeared for big chunks of the story with our love interests barely noticing their absence, and even when they’re on the page they only turned up when Pen and Neil needed emotional plot devices. I couldn’t understand why Pen and Neil were so opposed to telling their friends about the ghosts, but it ended up excluding them so fully from the main plot that they had very little to do. It was as if they ceased to exist the moment our love interests stopped talking to them. Wilkens also didn’t do as much with the setting as she could have. We get basic descriptions, but I finished the book not really understanding the landscape inside and outside the castle. We only see a couple of rooms, and most of that time is spent on Pen and Neil either arguing, flirting, or running away.
If I Stopped Haunting You by Colby Wilkens is a romance with a horror twist that delighted me from start to finish. In spite of some weaker elements in characterization and description, I was hooked. Our love interests are charming and emotionally messy, and their rocky journey was a pleasure to follow along with. The sex scenes are the right amount of steamy, but the real selling point is hearing from two characters who normally don’t get to take center stage in traditionally published romance novels. Wilkens does a fantastic job of exploring how both Pen and Neil approach “authenticity” in a way that is as refreshing as it is honest.
If I Stopped Haunting is published by St. Martin’s Griffin.
