Guest post written by When Ghosts Call Us Home author Katya de Becerra
Katya de Becerra writes atmospheric horror about complicated families in enigmatic places; including a host of short stories; and the novels What the Woods Keep; Oasis; and When Ghosts Call Us Home. She has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology and teaches and researches at a Melbourne university. Find out more about Katya and her writing at her website and follow her on Instagram, X, and Facebook – @KatyadeBecerra on all platforms.
When Ghosts Call Us Home is an edge-of-your-seat thriller that explores the power of family ties and the trauma that lurks there—think Haunting of Hill House meets found-footage horror in this
When Ghosts Call Us Home, my third novel, is a story about two sisters, Layla and Sophia Galich, who once lived in an allegedly haunted mansion, while their architect parents were busy restoring its collapsed patio.
The enigmatic mansion, Cashore House, sitting on a dangerous cliff, overlooking the Pacific, became the setting for a horror movie the sisters created together. Sophia, the younger of the two, was the movie’s unwitting star, with Layla directing. The movie became known as Vermillion. Layla claimed it was named after the invisible demon that holds Cashore in its grip. But was there ever a demon, a ghost? Or was the movie, a collection of disturbing vignettes, mimicking the found footage subgenre with its shaking camera feel and scenes of Sophia’s frightful encounters assembled out of order, simply a gruesome product of Layla’s imagination? Either way, the sisters’ fate has been tied to Vermillion ever since.
A few years later, Layla disappeared.
As most (allegedly) haunted houses, Cashore House is brimming with layers of tragic history. If its walls could talk, oh the stories they would tell. As the Galich sisters moved through these halls, Layla holding the camera, Sophia caught in the moment, it felt as if countless watchful eyes followed them, and the house undulated around them, waiting for its moment to lunge.
Vermillion became an underground sensation, attracting a cult-like following, with fans, or V-heads, obsessively speculating about the footage and its hidden messages. Was it all real, was it all real, was it all real? After Layla’s mysterious disappearance, Sophia is forced to revisit this question herself as she explores the terrifying depths of this fandom, desperate for clues as to Layla’s whereabouts.
One of the central ideas of the book is the power our memory holds over us. Sophia’s search for her sister demands a lot from her—until her very identity is at stake. Her present collides with her past, each new earth-shattering encounter creating fractures in the terrain she thought she knew by heart. And so this terrain of memories becomes less certain, more unstable.
The book’s opening—Ghosts are memories. We carry them in our blood—sets the tone of Sophia’s exploration of the past, running like a leitmotif through the narrative. Afterall, what are we if not an accumulation of memories, their depths awaiting our inward excavation?
The book is also a story about trauma, identity, and, yes, the past. As we’re trapped in our present, our future unknown, the past offers a sense of stability. But, as Sophia learns, this stability is an illusion, and our memories are often selective, or supressed. We remember what we choose to, these choices affected by strong emotions—yearning, embarrassment, love, fear. Mostly, fear.
The haunted house trope provides a powerful vehicle to explore how we relate to our memories, to our past. Every floor, every room, every door of a haunted house can offer a clue, can give us an unexpected angle, and add a new ghost to our collection.
Lastly, When Ghost Call Us Home is a story about family.
Sophia and Layla are complex, each unique in her their own right, and yet defined by what they are to each other, what they have together. They fight and they make up, they love each other deeply even when they hurt and endanger one another.
An early reader asked me why doesn’t Layla get to tell her own story, why is it Sophia’s perspective alone that guides our descend into the depths of Cashore House?
My answer: Layla knows what happened in that house, she knows how her cursed movie was created (real or not real/demon or no demon/ghost or no ghost) and what it really did to her and her sister. Sophia was an innocent child then, a devoted brat who followed Layla everywhere, and who trusted her older sister not to put her in danger. So, this is Sophia’s story—she’s the only one left who can dig into her past and uncover the truth about Layla, about what really happened to them in that haunted mansion by the sea.
As I send the book off into the world I relinquish my control over its ghosts.
These ghosts are now up to the readers’ interpretations.
I just hope that the story’s main ideas will resonate. I hope that the readers will see a little bit of themselves in Sophia’s determination or in Layla’s dedication to her art, or perhaps in Cashore House’s stoic demeanour.
But most of all, like with all my writing, I hope this story will find its crowd.
