Haunted MTL Original – Beach House – Jack Wildern
Beach House by Jack Wildern
I lay in bed listening to the wind push itself through the walls. As if the bricks have holes in them. I’m imagining Helen blowing kisses across my face in the dark.
“But she isn’t here is she.”
Laughter greets this. Familiar yet alien. That’s my voice. But it doesn’t belong to me. The anxiety creeps up in my throat.
I throw back the duvet and I’m instantly cold. The house is an ice box. My feet on the wooden floor give me a shock.
The hallway is pitch black. There are no windows. Feeling my way across the wall, half expecting it to open up and swallow me where I would stay, trapped forever.
“Where you belong.”
“Fuck off.”
The spare room door creaks on rusted hinges. Inside is a pale light. The curtains are open. They should be closed. I closed them.
Helen sits in a rocker by the window.
In the corner a cot. I sink to my knees, white knuckles gripping the bars. Black, glassy eyes staring at a wailing bundle.
“Please. Just_”
Singing. Faint and far away. Helen cradles the baby. Soothing, reassuring. The moonlight paints her face a pale blue.
“Hel_”
“Hush. She’s sleeping.”
“I can’t do this anymore.”
The walls close in, suffocating me.
***
I don’t sleep. But the morning light is here. A reluctant grey face weeping tears across the window. No footsteps. No crying. They’ve left me alone. It’s early. If I get out now I can watch the tide come in.
On the beach the waves climb the black, crooked limbs of the pier. Like a spider drowning in a puddle of water. The thought makes my throat run dry. The spray soaks my jeans. I put my face to my thigh. Damp. Salty. I breathe in hard and let it the fabric block my nose and mouth.
In another time and place I’m laughing, chasing Helen. Her brown hair escapes through my fingertips. The sunlight warms our skin as my hands close around her waist. My world fell apart when she smiled. It collapsed around me and I let it go. She rebuilt it for me. A better place than before. We filled it with people, places, memories and a perfect face that stared up in wonder at this new world and the people that built it.
When I open my eyes she is rocking the pram back and forth.
“Why are you here?”
She doesn’t answer. Just rocks and smiles, rocks and smiles.
“Moving here. It was supposed to be a new start.”
She looks at me then. The same look I ran away from.
“I’m sorry.” My eyes glance toward the bundle in the pram. She starts to pull back the blanket.
“No Helen I can’t. Jesus Christ you know I can’t.”
I walk away. Her eyes boring into my back. Watching. Judging.
***
I wake up in darkness with my head resting on the kitchen table. They move about upstairs. Hands clap. Helen’s voice carries a nursery rhyme.
“Listen to how happy they are Jack.”
“Stop it.”
The rain starts to fall. Tiny fingers tap on the windows and build into fists that hammer on the glass. I cover my ears from a scream, vaguely aware that it could be me. The room starts to shake.
Upstairs water runs down the walls. A gale blows through the hallway carrying a stench of sea water and petrol. There is something else too, something sweet and rotten. Screaming from inside the spare room. I throw open the door and headlights blind me. My old ford. Submerged in water. It’s horn blaring.
I go to the window. The water rises. My own face stares back at me, stupid and terrified. In the passenger seat is a rag doll that used to be my wife. Slumped over the dashboard, hair floating in the water.
“HELEN!”
Nothing but darkness again and the moonlight cutting a shard across the damp floor. A sweet song drifting up from the old rocker. I am mad. This is not real. I am not real.
“Look Jack.”
I close my eyes. Shaking my head.
“Look at the life you made for them.”
“Leave me alone.”
“She’s so pretty isn’t she Jack?”
Helen is in front of me. Her face bloated. The bundle in her arms writhes and thrashes beneath the sheet. Water in her lungs. Gasping for air.
“Look at what you did.”
She pulls back the sheet and my world falls apart again. Only this time I fall back into the nightmare. The walls are screaming mouths. The wind breaks my skin and the water washes my blood away. I am a skeleton, a fragment, nothing. I am lost in an ocean.
“Stop it. Fucking stop it!”
I wake up on the floor.
There is no wind. There is no rain. There are no headlights. There is no cot.
“You are alone.”
Jack Wildern is from the UK. He writes short fiction and lives in Hampshire with his wife and two children. Most recently his work has been published in The Book Smugglers Den and Parhelion.
Imagine this. You’re home alone, waiting for your partner to return, when you hear a knock on your door. You answer it to see a family of five, bundled up against the cold. The father, a kindly older gentleman, explains that he used to live in this house as a boy. And he would love to show it to his family.
Do not let them in.
The story
Released in June 2024, We Used To Live Here is author Marcus Kliewer’s debut novel. It tells the story of Eve, who just purchased a beautiful house with her partner, Charlie. Their plan is to flip the house and sell it.
One night, while waiting for Charlie to come home, Eve is surprised by a knock at the door. It’s a man named Thomas Faust and his family.
Thomas explains that he grew up in the house and hasn’t been in the area in years. Would Eve let them in so that he can show the home to his children?
Against her better judgment, Eve lets them in. She regrets this almost at once when Thomas’s daughter vanishes somewhere into the house.
What worked
I always appreciate a book that allows you to play along with the mystery. And this book does that better than just about any other I’ve seen.
Pay close attention to the chapters, to the words that aren’t there. To everything about this novel.
This is mostly down to Kliewer. This is ultimately his work of art. But the production value is also fantastic. I don’t want to ruin the multiple mysteries, so I’ll just say this. There are clues in this book that require some specific artistic choices in the page layouts in this book. And I loved that.
If you’d like to experience another horror book review, check out this one.
We Used To Live Here is also the kind of story that makes you question everything right along with the main character, Eve. Eve is a great main character. But she might be an unreliable narrator. She might be experiencing every single horror described, exactly as it’s described. Or, she might be having a psychotic breakdown. Through most of the book, we can’t be sure. And that is so much fun.
Finally, the weather plays a large part in this story. There are several stories in which the weather or the land itself could be considered a character. Even an antagonist. This is certainly one. The winter storm is the thing that traps the family in the house with Eve. It also makes escaping the home difficult. Reading this book during the winter was especially impactful. Most of us know what it feels like to be shut in by a storm. I’ve personally lived through some of those storms that are just referred to by their year, as though they were impactful enough to claim the whole 365 days for themself. And that was with people I liked. Imagine what it would feel like with strangers. It’s a staggering thought and one that we explore in depth in this book.
- Get Out meets Parasite in this eerily haunting debut and Reddit hit—soon to be a Netflix original movie starring Blake Lively—about two homeowners whose lives are turned upside down when the house’s previous residents unexpectedly visit
- As a young, queer couple who flip houses, Charlie and Eve can’t believe the killer deal they’ve just gotten on an old house in a picturesque neighborhood
- As they’re working in the house one day, there’s a knock on the door
Last update on 2025-03-08 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API
In the end, We Used To Live Here is a fantastic book. It’s the sort of story that sneaks into your brain and puts down roots. And if this is just the first book we’re getting from Kliewer, I can’t wait to see what else he comes up with.
(5 / 5)
As a disclaimer, this is a review of The House of My Mother from a critical perspective. I will not be discussing my opinions of the legal case against Ruby Franke and Jody Hildebrandt. I will be discussing the merits of the book as a work of true crime alone.
In 2015, Ruby Franke started a YouTube channel called 8 Passengers. In August of 2023, Franke and her business associate Jodi Hildebrandt were arrested for, and later plead guilty to, charges of aggravated child abuse. And in January of this year, Shari Franke told her story in The House of My Mother.
The story
The House of My Mother is the true story of Shari Franke, the oldest child of one of the most famous family vlogger families.
As a child, Shari came to the conclusion that her mother didn’t like her. Soon, she began to fear her mother’s anger.
Things got significantly worse when Ruby started their family vlog. All of the families most intimate moments were splashed across the internet for anyone to watch. This became a living nightmare for Shari.
Of course, that was only the start of the family nightmare. Because Ruby was about to meet someone who would reinforce all of the darkest parts of herself.
Eventually Shari manages to escape her home. But her younger siblings were still in her mother’s clutches. She had to save them, and her father, from the monster her mother had become.
What worked
Through the book, Shari only ever mentions the name of one of her siblings, Chad. This is because Chad is the only of her siblings that is an adult at the time of the publication.
There are children involved in this story. Children who’s lives and privacy have already been damaged. Shari didn’t want to do that to them again, and neither do I.
It probably won’t surprise you that this book is full of upsetting details. But not in the way you might imagine.
Nowhere in this book will you find gory details about the abuse the Franke kids suffered. And I consider that a good thing. Those sort of details are all fun and games when we’re talking fiction. When it’s real kids who are really living with the damage, it’s not a good time.
What you’ll find instead is a slew of more emotionally devastating moments. One that stuck with me is when Ruby’s mother gives her a pair of silk pajamas as a gift after Ruby gave birth to one of her babies. Shari asks Ruby if she’d bring her silk pajamas when she had a baby. Ruby responds that yes, when Shari becomes a mother they can be friends.
What a lovely way to make a little girl feel like she’s not worth anything unless she reproduces. And, if she does decide to have children, who is going to bring her silk pajamas?
- From eldest daughter Shari Franke, the shocking true story behind the viral 8 Passengers family vlog and the hidden abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother, and how, in the face of unimaginable pain, she found freedom and healing
- Shari Franke’s childhood was a constant battle for survival
- Her mother, Ruby Franke, enforced a severe moral code while maintaining a façade of a picture-perfect family for their wildly popular YouTube channel 8 Passengers, which documented the day-to-day life of raising six children for a staggering 2
Last update on 2025-03-02 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API
In the end, this isn’t a story about ghosts or demons. It’s not about a serial killer waiting on a playground or in the attic of an unsuspecting family. Instead, this is a story about things that really keep us up at night. It’s the story of a woman so obsessed with perfection that she drove away her eldest daughter. The story of a young woman who’s forced to watch from afar as her beloved brothers and sisters are terrorized and abandoned. These are the sorts of things that really keep us up at night. These are the real nightmares.
More than that, though, The House of My Mother is a story of survival. It’s about a family that was ripped apart and somehow managed to stitch itself back together again. It’s about a brave young woman who managed to keep herself safe and sane in the face of a nightmare. If you haven’t read it yet, I can’t recommend it enough.
For more like this, check out my review of Shiny Happy People.
(5 / 5)
Boreal: an Anthology of Taiga Horror is a collection of twenty-two haunting tales that dwell in the deepest darkest woods and frozen wastelands, edited by Katherine Silva and including Haunted MTL’s very own Daphne Fauber. Each story has even been gifted with its very own poster, hinting at the horrors to be found within it, bestowing a beautiful visual collection as well.
The tales are varied and touch upon the environment in new and different ways, each hearkening to a sort of epiphany or raised awareness. These stories exude both dread and wonder at the smallness of our human existence in contrast to the sacred world we have isolated from, sheltering ourselves in our comfortable houses with centralized heat and everything we could possibly need or want at the ready. The taiga becomes a sanctuary outside of our own dulled awarenesses. It is a holy place imbued with powers beyond mortal human reach, a wilderness that threatens to swallow us – both whole and bit by bit, simultaneously.
The protagonists enter into this realm through ritual, superstition, longing, stubbornness, and their own hubris – yearning to survive its dangers, and to make their own marks upon it. The starkness of their surroundings harbors delicate moments that would be all too easily missed if not deliberately sought or pointed out. The softness of fur, the dappled sunlight shining through trees, the hazy clouds of breath forming in crisp air, the brittleness of bleached bone… those quiet experiences that beg to be forgotten, to lay safely sleeping just below the frozen surface, awaiting spring.
There are those who followed in the footsteps of their predecessors, seeking to escape the constraints of their parent’s and elders’ indoctrination, traditions, madness, and abuse, yearning to find their own way despite also being inextricably bound to their own pasts. There are those who just wanted to go for a walk in the woods, and remained forever changed by what they experienced. There are those who wished to impose their will upon the wilderness, their order falling to disarray, unable to make lasting impact. There are those who sought to leave behind the world of mankind, looking for oneness in the natural order of things through isolation, leaving a bit of themselves behind after being consumed by the terrors they encountered. There are those who truly found communion with the woods, became one with its wildness, and invited its spirit into their hearts to find peace, even at cost of their own lives. And then, there are the spirits themselves…
(3 / 5)
All in all, I give Boreal: an Anthology of Taiga Horror 3.0 Cthulhus. I love existential angst so I found it to be an enjoyable read, and I appreciated the myriad manners in which the biome was explored. But there were points in which I found myself struggling to follow along, as if the words were swept up into their own wilds in ways that alienated myself as reader, as if my mere voyeurism into this otherworldly place was not enough to comprehend the subtle deviations in storytelling mannerisms fully. I suppose in some sense this seems appropriate, but at the same time, it left me feeling a bit unfulfilled, as if I had missed a spiritual connection that should have resonated more deeply.
- English (Publication Language)
- 248 Pages – 02/25/2025 (Publication Date) – Strange Wilds Press (Publisher)
Last update on 2025-01-23 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API