![]() The walls of the basement stretch and reconstitute themselves, leaving a gap between them and the newly laid carpet. The dimensions of the walls and cupboards begin to change, as though the foundation was a growing organism. Mike’s job is threatened by the surreal acrimony of his new boss, but just as he starts to question his future, strange events begin to occur in the house. ![]() The fairytale, however, quickly distends into a slow-burn, anxiety-fuelled nightmare. It isn’t just that they’ve never owned a house neither Mike nor Lisa have ever experienced the stability of home. Both Mike and Lisa grew up in itinerant households: Mike’s parents were house-flippers and Lisa’s mother worked for a management company who moved her from complex to complex every few months. But there is a special meaning in this house for the pair. The house is large, new, and, best of all, affordable. The couple begin the novel, as so many young people today are beginning their adult lives, riding the tailwinds of macro global economic and geopolitical forces.Īs soon as Mike begins his new role, they purchase a house in a charming, all-American housing community a small commute from the city. Mike, formerly an effects employee in Hollywood, takes a straight-edge bank job managing their virtual meeting quality, a role that no doubt has its origins in the global response to Covid. It is in this era - the era of Donald Trump and Covid the era of George Floyd and war in Ukraine an era of profound disorientation and disenchantment - that Mike and Lisa Ellis move from LA to Washington DC. It’s a muted but growing anxiety that mostly goes unacknowledged yet nonetheless pokes its ugly head into the mainstream through the occasional statistic (such as in this piece from The New Republic that reveals seventy-five per cent of young people don’t believe they will have a future due to climate change and economic instability). Lunacy shows an acute awareness of an unnamed dread that runs below the surface of American social life. With Lunacy, Chris Coppel has crafted a unique and uncomfortable new vision of haunted America: a horror story where the supernatural elements serve as an uncanny gestalt for the rot seething beneath the sheen of the American Dream.Ĭoppel’s latest novel may be properly termed ‘the horror of instability’ (or so this writer is branding it). ![]() It should come as no surprise, then, that this evolving outlook on what home is and means should be brought to bear on the genre of the haunted house. ![]()
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