Preorder DEATH IS A ROOM: Domestic Nightmares from Women Writers

Every haunted house was somebody's home. Writing in an era when a home was meant to be a woman's world, these writers made tales out of what that world concealed — dissatisfaction pooling inside walls, years disappearing behind a door, ordinary rooms that hold extraordinary horrors. The Yellow Wallpaper famously centered this dread; in this anthology, Julie Doucet illustrated Charlotte Perkins Gilman alongside Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin, Susan Glaspell, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Elizabeth Gaskell, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Olivia Howard Dunbar and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: authors who wrote the trap from inside it. Some of their houses are haunted by the dead, some by the living. It’s not clear which is worse. The gothic, Carmen Maria Machado writes, is not a historical genre. It is alive, moving, operating today. Julie Doucet renders these interiors in dense, hallucinatory linocut, each room rendered as if the walls have already closed in. A mind coming apart under doctor's orders. A murder weapon buried in the night. An hour of freedom, and a heart that stops like a clock. Every room in this house hides a story. These are the women that told them.