Out of the corners and shadows
‘THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH THE PLACE’ IS A FAMILIAR FEAR AND, JUST MAYBE, LISA UNGER KNOWS WHY
The building was a beautifully appointed prewar gem, with a uniformed doorman and a green awning, nestled in Murray Hill on Park Ave in New York City. This is not the fictional building The Windermere from my new thriller The New Couple In 5B. This is the real place where my aunt lived when I was kid, a place that seemed like the ultimate city apartment. It was sunwashed and airy, with a fireplace and stunning views of the Chrysler Building. But my aunt was a complicated woman, so visits there were always layered and confusing. Maybe because of that dichotomy, this was the apartment that surfaced when I started writing my novel. A place that was at once beautiful, a dream, and yet underpinned by something dark, something unpredictable.
Rosie and Chad Lowan are a young couple living in New York. Rosie is a true crime writer and Chad is an actor. Their luck has been all bad recently. She’s wrestling with the proposal for her second book. He can’t find work that’s meaningful to him. They are struggling to start a family. But when they receive a surprise inheritance of a magnificent apartment in an iconic building, it seems like their luck is about to change. The Windermere has other ideas. When a neighbour turns up dead, Rosie knows she has to dig deeper into the history of this complicated place before she and her husband fall under its spell.
Place has such an impact on our lives. If you think about your childhood home, you probably remember details very vividly. How the light came in through the kitchen window, or the sound the refrigerator made. But most of all, you likely recall the feeling of being a child in that place – whether you were safe or loved. Or not.
Houses, buildings, a fictional town, or parcels of land often figure in my novels. The places we choose. Or the places that choose us. Why do we fall in love with a certain house? Or why, when we walk into another, might we feel repelled? In my novels, places hold energy. They can become characters with a part to play in a story.
“There’s something wrong with the house,” is a sort of trope I suppose. We can all think of books and films where the dwelling is a particularly bad actor: The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson; The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson; The Shining by Stephen King. But what has always struck me about these stories is that often we find it’s not the places that are haunted, but the people. In fact, the dwellings are often the victims, acting from the pain they hold within their walls. And the residents of the building are vulnerable to the darkness.
It’s that intersection that has always interested me. Might we choose a house because it meets a particular need we have, whether or not we are consciously aware of that?
In the writing of The New Couple In 5B, Rosie emerged as a character who was uniquely vulnerable to a place like The Windermere. Estranged from her family of origin, unable so far to start a family of her own with her husband, and having run from a traumatic childhood, she is a person looking to create a home. She’s distanced herself from her parents because she views them as con artists and charlatans. She doesn’t believe that she, as her father claims, has any special abilities. And yet she sees things in The Windermere that no one else (except the resident medium) does. Are they ghosts? Is there “something wrong” with the Windermere? Is
Rosie a “seer” like her father believes? Or is she unstable?
The universe is a complicated place. And there are far more questions than answers about perception, the human brain and its capabilities, paranormal (whatever that means) activity and who might be sensitive to frequencies from the beyond. But what’s known is that we are energetic beings; our actions, thoughts, and feelings create vibrations. It’s not difficult to imagine that the places we build, and in which we dwell, hold those vibrations, and then seek to express them. It’s possible that’s why, as readers, we never tire of the theme “there’s something wrong with the house.” Because it’s a story, not about places, but about us, and the lives we live within those walls.
The New Couple in 5B by Lisa Unger is on sale now, published by HQ Fiction.
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