TITLE: A Voice Calling
AUTHOR: Christopher Barzak
103 pages, Psychopomp, ISBN 9798891160019 (softcover, also in e-book)
MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5
Christopher Barzak’s new novella A Voice Calling is ostensibly a haunted house story, but it is also very much a haunted community story, an elegiacally written and unsparing look at the way secrets and violence can permeate and shape both places and people (individually and collectively).
In Barzak’s hands, Button House takes a rightful place alongside Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, Poe’s House of Usher, King’s Marsten House, and Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall as iconic haunted houses (each of those listed left an indelible mark on my imagination; your list may be different). Button House has a mood I can only describe as “habitable desolation,” thanks to its history. That history, revealed through flashbacks of varying lengths throughout the narrative, starts with an unsurety as to whether the house or the orchards that surround it came first. One way or the other, the property has roots that are more than one hundred years old, and most of that history is sordid and bloody. House and orchard together are fixed in my mind as someplace I wouldn’t want to be alone in at any time of day – and Barzak works this magic with very few detailed descriptions of the house and grounds. It is largely through mood and inference that a picture of the property forms in the reader’s mind, which I think is far more effective than overly detailed descriptions of the furniture in every room.
But as I said, it’s not just the house that is haunted. It is the nearby community as well. This community narrates the story with a collective “we.” These faceless, and mostly nameless, voices are at times judgmental, speculative, defensive, infuriated, occasionally even concerned – but they are never warm, never really welcoming or hospitable. And thus they are also blind both to how complicit they are in the events that occur (by turning a blind eye to the house and its inhabitants when attention might have swayed matters) and to how haunted they are by those events. The fear of a community is a palpable thing, self-perpetuating and uncontrollable. As the book progressed, I found myself increasingly picturing the narrators as one of the angry mobs from the early Universal monster films. Like those mobs, Barzak’s narrators never really gain any sense of individuality. Sure, we get a townsperson’s name here and there, for color. But we never get to know them.
We do get to know the focal character of the present day portions of the novel, the character the nameless narrators are most concerned about because she used to be one of their own: Rose Billings (the narrators never really accept her marriage to Button House’s last living resident, Jonas Addleson, and thus never refer to her by her married name, another manifestation of their fear and mistrust). Caught out near Button House during a bad storm, Rose, who has heard voices in her head all her life, feels called to the House. But did the House call to Rose because Jonas needed rescue, or because something else did? Barzak neatly conjoins this mystery with the bloody history of the house in prose that is compelling and engrossing, with not a superfluous word in the work. Even with chapter breaks, the story has so much momentum that it qualifies as my first “couldn’t put it down until I was done” read of 2024.
Throughout my reading, I kept feeling like the story was familiar, like I’d read it before. I chalked it up to Barzak being one of my favorite writers and just feeling at home in his style, because this is the first publication in any form of A Voice Calling. My feeling was correct, though. This novella grew out of a short story “What We Know About the Lost Families of –House,” which I’ve read at least once. The original story is great, but the novella format gives the story a bit more room to breath and to suck the reader into Button House’s history.
This book is also the first release from small press publisher Psychopomp (previously known for The Deadlands magazine). It is an excellent start to what I am confident will be a lengthy line of eerie books that explore our relationship with death in all its myriad facets, as well as what may or may not come after.