Helen House
2022
First Published
4.09
Average Rating
70
Number of Pages
Right before meeting her girlfriend Amber's parents for the first time, the unnamed narrator of Helen House learns that she and her partner share a similar both of their sisters are dead. As the narrator wonders what else Amber has been hiding, she struggles with her own secret—using sex as a coping mechanism—as well as confusion and guilt over whether she really cares about Amber, or if she's only using her for sex. When they arrive at the parents' rural upstate home, a quaint but awkward first meeting unravels into a nightmare in which the narrator finds herself stranded in a family's decades-long mourning ritual. At turns terrifying and erotic, Helen House is a queer ghost story about trauma and grief.
Avg Rating
4.09
Number of Ratings
244
5 STARS
34%
4 STARS
43%
3 STARS
19%
2 STARS
2%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads
Author
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Author · 2 books
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Miami. She is the assistant managing editor at TriQuarterly and a writer for Autostraddle. She made her fiction debut in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, and her short stories also appear/are forthcoming in Catapult, The Offing, Joyland, and others. Some of her pop culture writing can be found in The Cut, The A.V. Club, Vulture, Refinery29, and Vice, and she previously worked as a restaurant reporter for Eater NY. She attended the 2020 Tin House Summer Workshop for short fiction and the 2021 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop for fiction. She is a 2021 fellow for Lambda Literary's Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices.
