Sick Houses is an exploration of unnerving and haunted domestic buildings, from simple family homes to imposing concrete tower blocks, and the fiction and real life that shows us these. The chapters focus on different types of architecture and spooky homes, sharing a range of examples and some of the eerie elements of these, and drawing on a range of media to look into what makes a house haunted.
I like Taylor’s approach to the idea of haunted houses, making it quite a broad term that doesn’t just cover houses with ghosts, but a range of types of ‘haunting’. There’s a lot of different material covered in the book, with a lot of examples, but I did find that it was more of a collection of different kinds of haunted homes rather than an analysis of things about them. I expected it to have more of an argument than it did, though I did like that the final chapter was Taylor’s own experiences and a sense of uncertainty around what exactly a haunting is. I’d say that it is good if you’re looking for something that shares a lot of different types of ‘sick houses’, but it is worth knowing that it isn’t an in-depth exploration of the concept of these houses and what it might mean. I think it would sit well alongside Jacob Geller’s YouTube video ‘Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House’, which takes the approach of analysing a few haunted houses more deeply, as for me that video set the bar very high for looking at the concept of a haunted house.
Fiendfully Reading 
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