Sick Houses

Explores the architecture of haunted houses, uncanny domestic spaces, and how the horror genre subverts and corrupts the sanctity of home.

Horror begins at home

From family homes in Amityville to Gothic mansions in Los Angeles and the Unabomber's cabin, houses often capture and contain the horror that has happened within them.

Sick Houses crosses the threshold of these eerie spaces to explore how different types of architecture become vessels for terror and how these spaces, meant to shelter us, instead become the source of our deepest fears. Using film, television, and literature to explain why we are drawn to haunted and haunting places, Sick Houses is a must read for anyone who has ever looked at a house and sensed there might be something unsettling going on inside."I've bought over a dozen copies of Leila Taylor's Darkly for friends and acquaintances since it first came out, and it remains to me one of the best and most essential books of the last ten years. Her latest, Sick Houses, is just as deft, insightful, and timely--and it's also destined to be a modern classic. Anyone who wants to know more about what makes a house haunted, and why we're drawn to such places in film and literature, should absolutely start here."
– Colin Dickey

"The homes of the normal, the eccentric, the magical, the violent, and the insane: Sick Houses reaches far beyond and far deeper into the lore and lure of the domestic space than any book before it. Leila Taylor has crafted a fascinating and comprehensive study into homes of all shapes and sizes, ages, and uses, homes from recent history and from popular culture. Examining issues of class, race, and gender, she asks us to reconsider why we consider a space a home, and why it becomes a place of haunting."
– Shelagh Rowan-Legg

"A thoughtful, personal, incisive and well-considered premise that will appeal to horror enthusiasts and storytellers alike, Sick Houses asks us to examine the universally relatable concept of home and how horror can intimately overturn the places in which we most seek and hope for safety."
– Leanna Renee Hieber, award-winning co-author of A Haunted History of Invisible Women and America’s Most Gothic

"Taylor’s mix of knowledge and humor is a treat. Anyone curious about houses with a history, and historically creepy houses, should check this one out."
– New York Times

"Sick Houses not only opened my eyes but renewed my fervor for reading and writing horror, to seeing beyond the mere trope and finding the bloody sinews, choices, and history beneath."
– Book RiotLeila Taylor is a Brooklyn-based writer, speaker, and designer whose work focuses on the intersection of history and horror and the gothic in contemporary culture. Author of Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, her essays have appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly, The Repeater Book of the Occult, The New Urban Gothic, and Bitter Root Vol. 3: Legacy.