Perfectly Ordinary Ghosts by Victoria Smith profile Horror 2018 Web Site

About the Story

Perfectly Ordinary Ghosts is a domestic horror interactive fiction.

It is a real house made imaginary.

In summer the ghosts come, and the violet orange of the humid night reaches new depths.

Gothic fiction has a long tradition of haunted houses; grand structures are geographically fixed but temporally shifting. Our memories of a place are fragmented and recursive, histories are personal and public at the same time. The Gothic sequence of descending from public to private to secret places - uncovering greater horrors as we go – gets twisted around a suburban house. Glass reveals, reflects and conceals, doors should stay shut.

Too often solitude is seen as something to overcome. Many myths feed on the image of a lone man against the wilderness – either a literal or metaphorical one. It is to be triumphantly conquered, wrestled down, beaten. There’s a quiet pleasure to immersing yourself in solitude, exploring the loneliness as a landscape. The rich inner worlds of women are rarely seen, as we continue to exist in our houses and in our heads.

Perfectly Ordinary Ghosts is about all of this and none of this. If you’ve made peace with the strange knocks you hear at night, so have I.

Content warnings: Contains mentions of rape, paranoia, and hallucinations

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