“Come home.” Vera’s mother called and Vera obeyed. In spite of their long estrangement, in spite of the memories — she’s come back to the home of a serial killer. Back to face the love she had for her father and the bodies he buried there.
Coming home is hard enough for Vera, and to make things worse, she and her mother aren’t alone. A parasitic artist has moved into the guest house out back, and is slowly stripping Vera’s childhood for spare parts. He insists that he isn’t the one leaving notes around the house in her father’s handwriting… but who else could it possibly be?
There are secrets yet undiscovered in the foundations of the notorious Crowder House. Vera must face them, and find out for herself just how deep the rot goes.
Somehow, while reading other people’s interpretations of the book while desperately searching for trigger warnings on my nth time pressing pause on the audio, no one has had the same interpretation as I have on the hardest part of Just Like Home.
Little things in it… small sequences, especially in the bedroom… speak of abuse. Not just the obvious abuse between Daphne and Vera, where Daphne resigned herself to not just being cold to Vera but neglectful as well, but sexual. Those moments where Vera speaks of coldness inside of her and her desperation to pull out the foreign things in her, pulling her insides out because of this horrible feeling of an invasion, a coldness in her body…?
here is my discord notes where i was noting it live:
i love haunted house stories and this book so far is doing a great job of having me go BUT WHAT HAPPENED TELL MEEA
Also… wet slapping noises? Groaning?! Bro…
Jesus her dad is 100% chopping people up in the basement
Oh my god this is totally a masturbation metaphor
the cold dark hole in her belly…
the cold thing inside of her, a long grey rope, “it will all be fine once it’s out” bro….
pulling her guts out
oh my god
pulling her guts out
sleep paralysis as a teen and then a voice like her dad’s?! dont worry im here oh my god did her dad…????
him whispering in her ear and his lips against her?!
on my life i need a break and to look up some tws real quick
the book IS dedicated to anyone who has loved a monster…
I guessed most of this, guessed about confinement in the basement, and i have been scrolli g to see if there is CSA. i feel like there are… Implications of it, a representation of forced sexuality
And yeah the reader of the audiobook knows how to fuck you up
Like… man. Fuck me, I guess— those night time visits are the “grease”, the danger lurking in hateful people, and it became part of the soul of the house. The house itself became alive with this grease, something made of terrible things that loves Vera wholeheartedly in such a frightening way.
A lot of people seemed to want more from this book, but I found it was just fine.
