I let my boomer parents talk me into buying a condo. A mortgage cost less than rent where I’d gone to get my PhD, and living without the intrusion of roommates or landlords seemed too good to be true after too many years of living with too many people in too small apartments. So went the reasoning.
The first week I lived there, a tree root crushed a pipe in the crawlspace and filthy brown water started spewing from the drain in the kitchen sink. A week after that, the showerhead broke off in my hand. Then the hot water knob. Then the toilet stopped flushing. Then the storm door came off its hinges. There were ten inches of snow on the ground the first time my heater went out. Then came the burglar, who broke in and took everything that wasn’t nailed down. Then came COVID, when everyone living with roommates or family disappeared into a bubble, and the solitude that had once been a delicacy started to feel more like solitary confinement. That was when I started to wonder whether living in that house might kill me.
At the time I was teaching Shirley Jackson in a class on women’s writing from my home office. Reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle with a group of undergrads who were trapped in their childhood bedrooms felt, at times, almost too close to home—I could sense which students felt an uncanny kinship with Merricat Blackwood, the troubled teenage narrator who takes unspeakable revenge on her nuclear family after years of quiet domestic torment. Some, like her milder-mannered sister Constance, felt a need to protect and defend her from their less forgiving classmates. Others stayed very quiet, shifting uneasily in their seats as family members moved through the background. My office hours were never so full, even when I had an office on campus: students wanted to talk about the book, but more than that they wanted to talk to someone other than a parent or sibling about how much they hated indefinite house arrest, the reversion to a family dynamic they were desperate to outgrow. Small wonder they saw something familiar in Blackwood Manor and its occupants—frozen in time, bad memories like black mold rotting the building from the inside out. The house (not unlike the titular mansion in Jackson’s earlier novel, The Haunting of Hill House) becomes a concrete, external representation of the inhabitants’ intimate psychoses. The story resonated unavoidably with anyone whose “bubble” felt less like a safe space than a deathtrap—including me.
I’d felt an uncomfortable kinship with Jackson and her characters for some time before that, even though the monsters that lurked in her life and in her work were the ones I had assiduously avoided: I was nobody’s wife and nobody’s mother and intended to keep it that way. My creative career was more important to me than any of the usual domestic milestones, and the sad stories of women like Jackson, whose genius was stifled by the tyrannous obligations of homemaking, served as early warnings to guard my autonomy at all costs. The people, I thought, were the problem—the spouses and siblings and children and in-laws and the so-called “family values” party who chose as their leader a thrice-divorced serial rapist. But in my few brief years of homeownership, I had been so beset by dreadful domestic mishap that I had to admit, even if you live there alone, a house can be a horror as much as a home. And no matter how isolated or self-reliant you are, you can’t avoid people completely. For better or worse, you’re human, too. There’s a limit to your mental fortitude.
Between the break-in and the endless residential disasters, I’d descended into a state of crippling paranoia—always bracing myself for the next blow. I changed filters and had appliances serviced religiously. I installed door alarms and nailed razor blades into all the window frames. I left my porch light on all night and slept with one eye open if I slept at all. I hadn’t been well for a while, afflicted like so many heroines of the gothic novels I’d loved in my adolescence by a mysterious, wasting malaise. I couldn’t eat and couldn’t sleep. Some days I couldn’t stop vomiting. Some days I couldn’t stay upright. Some days I couldn’t even stay conscious. But telehealth couldn’t provide any real insight, so I’d learned to live with the minor hallucinations that come with malnutrition and sleep deprivation, just like I’d learned to live with broken toilet chains and backward cabinet doors and a kitchen without any drawers. The house, though far less grand that Hill House or Blackwood Manor or Dracula’s castle or Wuthering Heights, was no less haunted—by me as much as anything. When I saw the first mouse—a flicker of movement in a dark corner—I told myself it was a trick of the light, a side effect of perpetual sleep deprivation.
But before long, the mouse became mice. They left enough evidence—trails of droppings like spilled chocolate sprinkles, holes gnawed in baseboards and boxes of dog bones—that I knew they weren’t a figment of my imagination. That should have been a relief, but it wasn’t. They grew bolder in numbers, and came out in the open, racing along the walls before they disappeared behind the fridge or under the coat closet door. Even when I didn’t see them, I knew they were there. I could hear them, scuffling and squeaking under the stove or gnawing away in the walls, eating the house from the inside out. Soon I couldn’t even tell what was a walking nightmare and what was nightmarishly real.
Mice, unlike the much more obvious intrusion of a husband or children, are a small but insidious danger. They chew through the wiring, contaminate food, spread diseases to people and pets. But the real threat—like the implicit threat of domestic abuse which colored Shirley Jackson’s life and fiction—is as much psychological as it is physical. When mice claim your home for their own, nothing is sacred. They got into my cereal, into my coffee, even into my potting soil. They took anything left out on the counter for more than a couple of minutes and pulled the stuffing out of cushions and pillows to make nests for more mice. I was surrounded and vastly outnumbered, with no food that felt safe to eat when I was already starving, and no place to sleep after days without rest without the chatter of teeth devouring things in the dark.
While I was re-reading Jackson, everyone else was re-reading Orwell’s 1984, trying to understand how dictatorship takes hold of a nation. Because I was raised in a conservative religious environment, that part wasn’t a mystery to me: I knew from ten malformative years of Catholic school how unquestioning dogma can consume anyone looking for an institution to mirror and legitimize their own existing prejudice. What I came to understand about the book instead was how quickly Winston Smith caves after months of torture at the prospect of having his head locked in a cage for rats to ravage his face. No matter how high your ideals, they crumple quickly when a primal fear is activated. Before I owned that condo I had never feared mice—I even kept them as pets as a girl, when I hadn’t yet found my creative calling and still thought I might like to be a vet. I never would have harmed an animal willfully and tried for months to trap the mice humanely. But they reproduced faster than I could catch them, and I was alone in there with my mysterious illness. If I got too sick to defend myself or sick enough to die, the mice would pick my bones clean before anyone even knew I was gone. My paranoia grew little gnawing teeth. Winston Smith’s betrayal of his lover suddenly made sense to me.
I declared war. Mice died by the dozen. Letting them live was one kind of horror but killing them was another. Like Merricat stirring arsenic into the sugar bowl, I smeared peanut butter on snap traps, where the mice’s insatiable appetites would be their undoing. Just desserts! I joked to steel myself each time I set the bait. I learned to place ten traps at once before they got wise, each time triggering a snap-happy nocturnal bloodbath, like the French Revolution in miniature. I’d go down in the morning and crawl under the furniture to retrieve each little guillotine, unsnap the traps and bag the bodies because I was too broke to buy anything I couldn’t reuse—because I’d put every penny I had toward a downpayment on the house. A hideous irony.
But my illness had worsened along with the mouse problem. Soon I was vomiting blood and utterly numb to the small, gruesome violence of rodent control. Without a doubt I was losing my mind, but not like Shirley Jackson or the wife in The Yellow Wallpaper, driven mad by husbands and doctors trying to “cure” them of their autonomy, as I had feared and fortified myself against. But I didn’t want to be Winston Smith either, so instead I became Captain Ahab, hell-bent on harpooning the whale who tore off his leg. Just like my house was no gothic manor, my vendetta was hardly so grand and romantic, but I was no less desperate.
One night, several weeks deep into the Great Infestation, I heard a snap trap go off downstairs and added a mark to the mental tally of how many corpses I’d have to collect in the morning. Then, instead of a snap, I heard a dull smack. Then another. Smack, smack, smack. Sleep long since given up for lost, I rolled out of bed to meet whatever fresh hell awaited. A mouse so large it could have starred in The Nutcracker had gotten its back leg snapped instead of its head, then dragged the trap across the room in a doomed effort to escape under the closet door. The trap wouldn’t fit, and went smack, smack, smack as the Mouse King tried to pull it through the crack.
I stood there a while, thinking how nice it would be to not be alone in this house of interminable horrors, how nice it would be to call a landlord and say, “I’ve had it, I’m moving out,” even how nice it would be to have a husband to handle it for me—a crazy, traitorous thought I had never had before in my life. My house had become my very own Room 101, with an interesting twist on Orwell’s method of torture. My worst fear wasn’t marriage or motherhood or even being eaten by mice; I was afraid of all those things, but only because they could open the door to what really terrified me, which was losing myself, losing my mind. The house and the mice and the sickness had brought me to the brink. I was kicking stones over the edge I and knew if I didn’t do something soon, it would be too late. Jackson died of heart failure at 48; I was even younger and wasn’t ready to join the ranks of writers struck down in their prime.
So, I put my hiking boots and my rubber gloves on. Maybe I was insane, but I wasn’t a sadist. I took the trap and the mouse out back and told myself to make it count. I only wanted to stomp on it once. At least I could put one of us out of our misery.
Thankfully, I wasn’t far behind. When the world emerged from isolation, I was examined by a dizzying number of doctors and finally diagnosed with an autonomic nervous system disorder— another hideous irony. Had I been Shirley Jackson or Sylvia Plath or Zelda Fitzgerald, they would have just called me “hysterical.” But it wasn’t 1950 and I had no children to mother, no husband to ship me off to an asylum or sign me up for electroshock therapy. With the right interventions, I was expected to recover, as much as you can from that kind of thing.
All I had was the house. Soon its illness was diagnosed, too. The HOA finally paid to fill the holes in the slab underneath the building. That kept the mice out, but the house wasn’t curable. I put it on the market the minute I graduated but still had to tie up loose ends before the inspection. Not long after I killed my last mouse, all the lights started flickering. “I don’t know if you need an electrician or an exorcist,” the technician told me, when he couldn’t find any fault with the wiring. Maybe he was joking or trying to scare me. But I was a writer, and writing is a kind of exorcism. How else to explain what haunts the fiction of women like Jackson—where houses are not homes but hotbeds of paranormal activity, where the family table is plated with menace and murder, where neighbors are not a community but a mob with torches and pitchforks?
I lived inside my own haunted house long enough that it lived inside me, even when I left it. When I started to write my next book, Graveyard Shift, I wasn’t planning to write about rodents. I wasn’t trying to tell a tale about madness. Still, everything I’d been through found its way onto the page. It turned into a story about fear of all sorts: the terror of things that go bump in the night, the unbearable pain of prolonged isolation, the agony of chronic insomnia, the uncanny emptiness of buildings long abandoned, the way our brains betray us when we push them past their breaking points, the terrible certainty of disappearing one day into death.
It was a lot to work through in one slim novella. But scribbling those 140 pages gave me somewhere to put it outside of myself. My feeling of kinship with Jackson, my attraction to her writing, no longer feels uncanny but inevitable. And if writing is exorcism, reading is catharsis: maybe readers of Graveyard Shift will see some of their own fears reflected, which is reassuring in its way. I was never as alone in that house as I thought. I had Shirley Jackson, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I had Ahab and Winston Smith. I had books and a job that gave me a reason to keep reading when I couldn’t find a reason for anything. Without them, I might have given up and gone mad for good—or been eaten alive by the mice.
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Graveyard Shift
