Spores and dust

Few of the notorious haunted houses in fiction are occupied on the basis of annual contracts overseen by a letting agent: usually it is precisely these houses’ unregulated status that has allowed ghosts to linger on the premises. But in Róisín Lanigan’s darkly funny debut novel, I Want to Go Home but I’m Already There, Áine and her boyfriend, Elliott, have accidentally rented one, and it is hard to break a tenancy, even if the ghosts are telling you to leave.

Lanigan is excellent on the real-life horror of the rental market. The creaky old flat has single glazing, a horrible mould problem and a nameless, very absent landlord. Áine, meanwhile, is a perceptive and amusing protagonist, seen in the close third person: “the fact that they were not on a direct tube line, which had before seemed like an advantage (it made the place cheaper), now revealed itself to be a huge inconvenience”.

The book is divided into twelve chapters, one for each month of the year, because “this was how [Áine had] become used to thinking of eras of her life … in terms of contracts and tenancies”. As this year unfolds, Áine and Elliott observe several milestones of living together for the first time: in May they host an ill-fated dinner party; in August they attempt to adopt a dog, only to discover that the requirements for housing a pet are far more extensive than for a person. They bicker throughout because Elliott dismisses Áine’s apprehension that the house is constantly trying to repel them.

Only after too much drink does the extent of the haunting reveal itself; the details are kept cleverly vague, but the feeling of dread is palpable. Áine lives in fear of being watched and avoids the spooky, dark expanse of the basement, which seems particularly suited to the proliferation of mould; she thinks obsessively of the string of past, unknown tenants and their detritus, of spores and dust; she longs for a home that would “only have her skin cells on it, only her history”.

While the ghosts could be figments of an unsettled mind, Áine takes them seriously because at home in Ireland it would be unthinkable not to. A banshee had foreshadowed two deaths in her family. Her friend Cian understands this, but Elliott does not.

This is a clever, urgent novel about the absurdities of the rental market, reminiscent of Holly Pester’s The Lodgers (2024) or Ella Frears’s Goodlord: An email (2024). Lanigan has set it firmly in the early 2020s, recognizable from the working-from-home set-ups, the central role of WhatsApp in Áine’s relationships and a cocktail bar with a neon sign that reads, “well behaved women don’t make history”. Such details are well observed, as is the general patter of 2020s London. “It’s not going to lower the fucking rent, babe”, snaps Laura, Áine’s former flatmate, who moved out to buy a houseboat. “I don’t think you can get a Foxtons discount for demonic possession.”

At times the book can be repetitive, and Áine has a frustrating habit of seeing people in black-and-white. More successful is the sense of unease with which Róisín Lanigan leaves us – an unease that will be familiar to anyone who has ever lived in a crumbling flat that is cheap because of its poor transport links, with a landlord who will never solve any of the building’s problems, let alone a ghost.

Lily Herd is an assistant editor at the TLS

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