Audrey's Door
by Sarah Langan
Summary
Audrey Lucas has assembled herself against the odds, out of a vagabond childhood spent managing a mother whose mental illness kept them moving one step ahead of collapse, into a Manhattan architecture career, a decent boyfriend she has just fled, and an obsessive compulsive orderliness the book treats as the scar tissue it is. When she finds an impossible bargain, a vast apartment in the Breviary, a landmarked pile on the Upper West Side, she takes it before asking the questions New Yorkers know to ask.
The Breviary is the novel's great invention: the sole surviving building of Chaotic Naturalism, a fictional fin de siècle architectural movement whose designs, slanted floors, impossible angles, a black chapel in the lobby, were meant to worship disorder, built by an architect who died mad, and inhabited ever since by a dwindling colony of ancient tenants who have grown strange in its keeping, and who greet Audrey with a courtesy that curdles. The previous tenant drowned her four children in the tub; the building would like something from Audrey too. It wants her to build a door.
Langan runs the haunted apartment tradition, The Haunting of Hill House and The Shining both named in its preface, through architecture itself, possession arriving as a design commission, blueprints Audrey wakes to find herself drawing, and grounds it all in the sharpest material: what it costs a poor woman to hold a place in a rich city.
Around four hundred pages.
Best for readers who want the New York apartment gothic renewed, with a heroine whose disorder is both vulnerability and weapon.
Historical Context & Significance
Audrey's Door won the Bram Stoker Award for 2009, Sarah Langan's second novel win in three years, a pace only the genre's biggest names had managed, and it completed her early claim: three books, three different horror architectures, the small town plague, and now the urban haunted house, each executed with literary finish.
The invented movement at its heart, Chaotic Naturalism, drew particular admiration, reviewers enjoying a haunting with a bibliography, complete with fictional architectural history and manifestos, and the book slotted into the recession's real estate anxieties with uncomfortable neatness, a horror novel about what people will overlook for an affordable apartment published into the housing crash.
Langan co founded the Shirley Jackson Awards in the same era, part of the generation formalising literary horror's institutions, and her later suburban novels kept the project; the Breviary meanwhile joined the short list of great fictional New York buildings, a cousin to the Bramford itself.