The Spite House: First class cursed-house horror

The Spite House by Johnny Compton

Spite houses are real and I went down a shallow rabbit hole preparing for this review. With his 2023 novel, The Spite House, Johnny Compton takes on the concept of a house built solely to irritate and harass nearby landowners, and morphs it into something original and scary.

Eric Ross and his two daughters, Dessa and Stacy, are making their way through Texas, trying to keep under the radar. They have the normal concerns a black family in Texas would have, but more than that, there is a fear of law enforcement or being recognized, although they clearly aren’t on anyone’s Most Wanted list. Eric, who has been taking low-end off-the-books jobs, applies to a strange ad for a caretaker of the local oddity, the Masson House, he sees an answer to several of his problems. First is money; the job pays suspiciously well. More importantly, Eric sees the house as a possible repository of the answers he seeks, answers to questions he hasn’t told us about.

This means bringing his two girls into a house that is at least presumed to be haunted and may be something worse. His employer, multi-millionaire Eunice Houghton, assures him that the children will be in no danger. Everyone who believes that, raise your hand. Eunice may think the spite house is cursed but she knows her family is, and she is desperate to end the curse before it takes her life, even if it means putting two children at risk. Or more accurately—two more children.

Johnny Compton

Compton uses a mosaic, shifting-POV writing style which distracted me at first, until I realized it was the most efficient way to get all the necessary information to the reader. What are Eric, Dessa and Stacy running from? How did Peter Masson survive World War I, or did he? What was the dread secret about Eric’s grandfather? Why did Masson build his tall, skinny house so it would teeter on the ridge above an orphanage? Whose voices does six-year-old Stacy hear, not only in the spite house, but in Eunice’s mansion as well?

Compton’s cursed house is physically creepy—about the width of an airplane fuselage, but four stories tall. The house isn’t the original part of the story, though. Stacy is, and through her, a mystery about Eric’s family line that plays out until the final pages of the book.

The point of view shifts show us a cadre of tough women. Eunice is strong even if morally misdirected. Emily a journalist; LaFonda, Eunice’s trainer and personal attendant; and Dana, Eunice’s assistant, are all smart women. So, too, is Dessa, Eric’s eighteen-year-old daughter. Even minor characters, like a restaurant server early in the book, or Neal, the ghost-debunker who has a friendly-adversary relationship with Eunice, are well depicted in just a few lines of dialogue.