A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

A sharp, spooky haunted house story in which the horror is 50% "terrifying spectre" and 50% "trapped on vacation with my awful family."

Anna Pace, a bisexual commercial artist who destroys her personal sketches as soon as she finishes them, reluctantly joins her horrendous family for a vacation in a beautiful Tuscan villa, Villa Taccola. Several things become clear almost immediately: 1) Anna is the family scapegoat, 2) if all the locals act weird every time you mention where you're staying, you should leave, 3) that goes double if you're given a key to a locked room and told to never use it, 4) Anna's twin brother's boyfriend is THE WORST.

Anna's interactions with her terrible, horrible, no good, very bad family are both deeply uncomfortable and kind of hilarious. The question in a haunted house story is always "Why don't they leave?" In this case, the family is trapped by a combination of denial and well-worn family patterns, to both terrifying and sometimes hilarious effect.

Anna is unsurprisingly fucked up, but in a way that turns out to be rather suited for dealing with the supernatural. She grits her teeth and carries on, as she's done while dealing with her family all her life, which turns out to have similar advantages and disadvantages whether you're being blamed for things you didn't do when you were eight or being disgustingly licked by a yellow-haired ghost.

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Content notes: one dead cat (most of the cats in the book are fine), children and a goat in danger. An outraged review on Goodreads says it's wrong about Italy.