There once was a father who slaughtered a pig, and his children saw that. In the afternoon, when they began playing, one child said to the other, “You be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher.” He then took a shiny knife and slit his little brother’s throat.
- Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering”
I came across this Grimm tale while conducting research for my novel, Monsters We Have Made, a story which also begins with a terrible crime committed by children: in this case, two young girls who fall under the sway of a mysterious creature they discover on the Internet. Like the fairy tale, my story, too, explores questions of boundaries: play violence versus real violence, fiction versus reality.
And like the Grimm Brothers, I’m interested in the power of stories; especially the ones that live beside us, within the spaces and the relationships where we feel most at home. When I think about “domestic horror,” I think about tales like these—in which what we fear comes not from the woods or from the sky, but from people and places familiar to us.
Although the domestic horror genre isn’t particularly new, and it isn’t even new to Crime Reads (see this primer from 2019), most definitions focus on physical horrors: knives, ghosts, corpses, exorcisms. But while writing this novel, I’ve realized that some of the most powerful and haunting works are those that explore something slightly different, something I’d call a horror of the domestic: by which I mean the psychological and emotional toll or terror of being a parent, a caretaker, a wage-earner, a spouse.
What’s most horrific in the Grimm Brothers’ tale above, and in the stories I’ve gathered below, is that the terrifying situation cannot be easily understood or explained. And perhaps this is, in fact, where true domestic horror lies: in our inability to explain to ourselves, to each other, why and how the people and spaces with which we are most intimate can suddenly, unpredictably, irrevocably strip our peace and certainty away from us.
Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child, 1988
Friends recommended The Fifth Child to me in the early days of this writing project, when I told them what I was working on. Harriet, the mother in Lessing’s novel, gives birth to what she refers to as a “goblin” or “troll” or “changeling”—her fifth child, Ben, who sucks her nipples black and blue and deliberately injures his older brother and kills a friend’s dog. What do you do with a monstrous child? How does society handle a mother who hates her child? How does a parent choose between caring for one child and caring for the others? Motherhood is “a series of impossible choices,” as one reviewer of this novel observed, and Lessing conveys this reality in direct and lucid prose. She dismissed critics’ attempts to determine what the novel was really about, calling their efforts a search for a simple solution when the horror of the book is that there is no simple solution; there is only the trap of the world, and of your own decisions, and of the life that you’ve created for yourself.
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, 1915
What could be more horrific than waking up transformed into a giant insect, or—in certain translations—a “monstrous” vermin? Approximately twenty-five percent of the population is frightened by insects and spiders, and Gregor’s family is understandably horrified at the sight of his new beetle-like form. Gregor, on the other hand, is more horrified by how his transformation impacts his ability to earn an income. “‘What a quiet life our family has been leading,’ said Gregor to himself… [feeling] great pride in the fact that he had been able to provide such a life for his parents and sister in such a fine flat. But what if all the quiet, the comfort, the contentment were now to end in horror?” Nearly all of Kafka’s novella takes place within the confines of the domestic space, and the story reminds us that food, shelter, comfort, and stability are never guaranteed. What happens when we’ve outlived our usefulness? Will we still be valued by a capitalist system—by our friends, family, and dependents—if we’re unable to work? Is it possible that uselessness and loneliness are even more horrifying than giant vermin? Perhaps!
Carmen Maria Machado, “The Husband Stitch” in Her Body and Other Parties, 2017
Machado’s short story “The Husband Stitch” incorporates many of the tales and urban legends collected in Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series. I remember how wonderfully terrifying I found these books as a child, and it’s a pleasure to spend time with a narrator who also remembers the girl in the graveyard, the bride in the corpse’s wedding dress, the killer with the hook for a hand. It’s wonderfully terrifying, too, to see how Machado revisits and adapts “The Girl with the Green Ribbon” (from Schwartz’s In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories) so that the horror in her version is much deeper and more complex than the physical horror of seeing a girl’s head roll off her body. In “The Husband Stitch”—the title referring to a surgical procedure terrifying in and of itself—what’s truly horrific is living as a woman in a world built by and for men; what’s horrific is the expectation that the narrator give and give and give of herself until she has nothing left. When her husband insists on untying the green ribbon that she has asked him never to touch, she pleads: “I’ve given you everything you have ever asked for… Am I not allowed this one thing?” The answer is no. “As my lopped head tips backward off my neck and rolls off the bed,” she tells us in her final line, “I feel as lonely as I have ever been.”
Leila Slimani, The Perfect Nanny, 2018 (Original French: Chanson Douce, 2016)
“The baby is dead,” opens the English translation of Slimani’s award-winning psychological thriller. “It only took a few seconds… The little girl was still alive when the ambulance arrived. She’d fought like a wild animal.” Slimani’s novel (like mine) was inspired by a true crime: in this case, a New York nanny who murdered two children under her care. At first glance, the darkness of this book is obvious: there is little that horrifies more than infanticide. Yet the novel centers not on the act itself, but on the political and cultural anxieties in which it is embedded: a working parent’s fear of leaving her child in a stranger’s care; the desperation of a domestic worker trapped in a life of isolation, insecurity, and economic distress; the terrifying realization that no matter how many references we check, how much security we pay for, or how intensely we love, calamity can strike.
The mother in Monsters We Have Made spends more than a decade after her daughter’s crime trying and failing to figure out exactly where she went wrong. When did the play violence turn serious? What kind of darkness lurks in the nooks and crannies of our homes? How do we ensure that our worst fears do not befall us?
To the most important question of all—Is there anything we can do to keep ourselves safe?—domestic horror says, resoundingly and irrevocably: No.
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