When strange things start happening to Vera in the house, they are sufficiently ambiguous that multiple rational explanations offer themselves up.

Lonely and loathed, Vera needs a friend – but Duvall is the last person she’d turn to. Current artist-in-residence James Duvall is full of insincere charm, determined to persuade Vera to open up to him. The family are reviled by the community of course, but the house attracts tourists – and artists – and their willingness to pay for access has kept Daphne afloat down the years. In the present, the question of the Crowder house is even more tangled.

I heartily recommend skipping that blurb and following in young Vera’s footsteps to discover the truth with her (and scream over her shoulder, even when she doesn’t. Everyone except the reader knows what happened at the Crowder house. While I feel a little daft tiptoeing around a spoiler that’s in the blurb, I loved the way Gailey layered my creeping unease by avoiding direct references to the sins that have dogged Vera’s adult life. Where her mother shows her nothing but bitterness and cruelty, her father always had love and approval – until Vera screwed everything up. Just Like Home alternates Vera’s cutting interactions with her mother Daphne in the present with rose-tinted memories of her childhood. A place that she can now return to, although she’ll find no welcome. A place where she knew who she was, and what she could be. She could have changed her name, of course, but it’s all she has left of her father and a time when things were better. Since being banished from her childhood home by her resentful mother, she has bounced from one dead-end job to the next, one short-term let to the next eviction.

Vera Crowder has never been allowed to escape her past. Where The Echo Wife examined toxic marriages and the stupidity of cloning your ex-wife (seriously dude, you didn’t think it through), Just Like Home tackles toxic families and trauma and the way these shape who we are – and who we want to be. I’ve always enjoyed Sarah Gailey’s work, but their recent pivot from alt history to off-kilter, sharp-edged thrillers driven by intimate personal drama has converted me from a passive admirer to an ardent fan. When her dying mother summons her after years of estrangement, Vera reluctantly returns to the house her father built.

Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey