The September House

Content warning: This section of the guide discusses addiction, domestic violence, and torture.

The trauma that domestic abuses causes in families is this novel’s most important and overt theme. Although the novel is ostensibly a work of psychological horror that tells the story of a haunting, its primary purpose is to illustrate the corrosive nature and long-term effects of domestic violence. The author uses supernatural elements to interrogate the very real cycles of violence, and in the midst of the narrative’s more fantastical descriptions, it also manages to reveal how deeply Hal’s abuse impacts his wife and daughter, illustrating the difficulties involved in escaping abusive relationships.

This novel contextualizes abuse, illustrating its cyclical nature. Both Hal and Margaret grew up in households that were marred by abuse, violence, and addiction, and both characters repeat the patterns they learned as children. Hal’s addiction and mistreatment of his wife and daughter mirror those of his father. Significantly, Margaret’s father also resembles Hal in many ways, and her behavior patterns reflect the tendency of children who grew up with abuse to seek out partners who also display abusive tendencies. Similarly, although Katherine is an intelligent woman and a successful adult, she also perpetuates cycles of addiction and abuse; she has a pattern of unstable romantic relationships and is prone to fits of anger that come very close to erupting into acts of physical violence.