Just Like Home

Vera Crowder, a woman whose adult life has been defined by transience and secrecy, returns to her childhood home after a twelve-year estrangement. Her dying mother, Daphne, has called for the first time in over a decade, asking Vera to clear out the house so it can be sold. The Crowder House was built by Vera's father, Francis Crowder, a man who loved his family and was eventually convicted as a serial killer. His death in prison is the only reason Vera agrees to come back. Her life has been unstable; she has moved from city to city, losing jobs whenever someone connects her name to the infamous Crowder case.

When Vera arrives, Daphne lies in a rented hospital bed in the dining room, emaciated and barely able to hold a cup of water. Vera instinctively says she loves her, but Daphne insists Vera call her by her first name. Dying has not closed the distance between them. Vera settles into her old bedroom, a small room under the stairs beside the locked basement door. On her first night, she sees a dark shadow beside the bed that vanishes when she blinks, and the bedframe rattles on its own. She dismisses these events as fatigue and snaps the fingers of her right hand four times, an old childhood superstition she thought she had outgrown.

The novel alternates between Vera's present-day experience and extended flashbacks. At eleven, Vera woke to thumps and wet slapping sounds beneath her bed. Francis checked the room and explained that animals sometimes wandered into the basement below, forbidding her from ever going down there. After he left, the noises resumed. Vera dangled her hand off the bed and snapped her fingers four times. The sounds faded, but something beneath the bed tried clumsily to mimic the snapping.

In the present, Vera's nights grow worse. She wakes paralyzed while a rasping, tender voice whispers near her ear, calling her "Vera-baby." When she ventures into town, she meets James Duvall, the current artist-in-residence at the Crowder House and the son of Hammett Duvall, the true-crime author whose bestselling book cemented the Crowder family's notoriety. James describes himself as a painter of haunted places. Vera is furious that another Duvall is profiting from her family's tragedy.

While clearing out the kitchen, Vera finds Francis's old thermos containing a torn journal page in his handwriting, expressing his love and his determination to keep bad things away from her. She recalls hiding his journal under the front porch before his arrest; the porch has since been rebuilt. More journal fragments surface in the pockets of Daphne's old clothes. Vera also discovers that Francis wrote to her every month during his first year in prison, but Daphne never passed the letters on. Devastated, Vera tucks the unopened letters into a dresser drawer, unable to face their contents.

Daphne's behavior swings between cruelty and startling tenderness. In one moment she tells Vera that her life began the moment Vera was born; in the next she convulses and expels dark, gelatinous tissue from her mouth in a smell of turned earth, mold, and sweet lemon. At dinner, Daphne hisses about "the grease" inside Vera, her eyes filming gray and dark mucus gathering at her mouth. Vera snaps her fingers four times and Daphne falls instantly silent.

The flashbacks gradually reveal Vera's complicity in her father's crimes. On a fishing trip when Vera was twelve, Francis shared his delusional worldview: He believed men are filled with a corrupting foulness he called "the grease" and that he drained it from them through a system, saving them from becoming monsters. Vera absorbed this ideology completely. She discovered a peephole beneath her bedroom floor that looked into the basement and spent months watching her father's work. She copied his key and descended one night to find a badly wounded man chained to the floor, telling the captive calmly not to worry because her father would kill him the next day.

The most devastating flashback occurs when Vera is thirteen. Convinced that the grease is corrupting Brandon Gregson, her childhood best friend, she lures him to the basement with a note. When he realizes the horror of the space and bolts, Vera grabs his ankle and pulls him down the stairs. She chains him and presses a pocketknife into his belly, believing she can drain the foulness. When blood flows instead of grease, she panics. Francis carries the bleeding boy to the hospital and confesses to all his crimes to protect Vera, accepting a prison sentence so the police will never question his daughter. Daphne strikes Vera across the face, the first and only time, and confines her to homeschooling until she turns eighteen. Francis dies years later from tuberculosis in prison.

In the present, Brandon passes the house and tells Vera he knows she is sorry, but he cannot know her anymore. He looks up at the Crowder House and says it would never let her leave. Meanwhile, supernatural activity escalates. Vera's blankets are pulled beneath the bed; something warm squeezes her hand in the dark. When she buys a platform bed to eliminate the space underneath, she wakes to find it moved to the center of the room, propped on the dresser drawer that held Francis's letters. The letters are gone. Vera also discovers that James has stolen journal fragments and embedded them in his artwork, and that Daphne signed the house deed over to him.

Determined to confront the entity, Vera hides in the closet overnight. Before dawn, a creature emerges from beneath the bed: hot pink, marbled with dark veins, with too-long multi-jointed fingers and an enormous mouth, oozing dark residue. When it discovers her decoy, the room plunges into absolute darkness. Vera chases the creature to the dining room and watches it climb into Daphne's body through her dislocated mouth. Speaking through Daphne, the creature explains that it has been trading control with Daphne as her body decayed. It was the creature, not Daphne, who called Vera home. Daphne has been fully dead since that first dinner, when Vera's finger snap was interpreted as permission to let her go. The dark tissue Daphne expelled was decomposing flesh, and the lemonade masked the rot.

Vera identifies the creature: It is the Crowder House itself, a sentient entity made from the accumulated biological residue of everyone who lived and died within its walls, growing from sweat, skin, blood, and breath over decades. The House confirms that Vera's finger-snapping ritual worked because it responded each time, muffling sounds or providing comfort. The grease is real, it explains, but it exists in the pipes, walls, and foundation rather than inside men. Francis's delusion was wrong, but Daphne exploited it, using his guilt to drive him to kill. The House reveals that James has been gouging pieces from the walls and floors to mix into his paintings, literally harvesting its body.

When James discovers his artwork ruined by the House, he storms inside and tries to force Vera out. The House locks the front door and appears in the entryway wearing Daphne's collapsing remains. In the moment James is stunned, Vera breaks free, pulls him to the floor, and beats him to death. The House absorbs his blood into the wood. She drags the body to the basement, feeling no horror, only the satisfaction of having surrendered to the hunger she has suppressed her entire life.

Vera peels away Daphne's remains, freeing the House from its disguise, and wraps her arms around the creature. She has spent her whole life trying to determine what makes a person good, trying to suppress the emptiness that filled only when she witnessed or participated in violence. She is not good, she concludes, and she is not bad. She is hungry, and for the first time, she is sated. The novel ends with Vera and the Crowder House together: the daughter of a serial killer reunited with the sentient house that raised her, fed by the same violence that built them both, and finally home.