A highly original haunted house story with scares and psychological themes, where the past, present and future collide. 

• Entertainment factor: ★★★★★
• Scare factor: ★★★★☆
• Psychological factor: ★★★★★
• Originality factor: ★★★★★
• Haunted house factor: ★★★★★
• Gothic factor: ★★★★★
• Witch factor: ★★★★☆

It Will Just Be Us is a scary haunted house tale with mystery, psychological and existential themes and a very original take on the genre. With beautiful prose, a gothic atmosphere and a smart set up this story has a lot to offer. 

It consists of 272 pages. 

Plot

After Samantha, Sam, Wakefield had a date with her sister Elizabeth, Lizzy, they got into a fight and Lizzy left Sam standing on the street. Minutes later Sam is robbed with a gun pointed at her head and suffers from anxiety afterwards. Because of guilt Lizzy lets her sleep in her house with her and her husband Donovan. But for several reasons it doesn’t work out and because Sam doesn’t want to go back to her own apartment, she goes home. To the old Wakefield Mansion where her mother Agnes still lives. 

The house is owned by many generations of Wakefields and a lot has happened there. Deaths, fights, peaceful moments, helping escaped slaves hide and find a home in the swamp behind their house. And the house remembers. The house is haunted but in an unusual way. It shows the echos of what happened inside the house and on the grounds. Memories coming to life like holograms playing out over and over again. 

Although Sam has a strained relationship with her mother, everything goes fine until Lizzy knocks on the door. Pregnant and angry at Donovan. After Lizzy moves in, Sam sees a strange boy. A boy without a face. A cruel boy who torments a bird and kills it. Soon she realizes that this boy might be Julian, the unborn child of Lizzy. Although the house only shows the past, doesn’t it? While Sam struggles with her relationship with her mother, her sister and now her unborn nephew she has to find out why he became this way and along the way finds out a lot more about her own history. 

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Short Review

Although the story has a simple premise with only a few main characters, it’s a very full and complex story that deals with a lot of themes. While it also has a very original haunted house premise and a gothic vibe. The past that keeps reliving inside the house, a locked door with no key, secret tunnels that lead into the swamp to help escaped slaves, villagers who think of them as the Wakefield witches and who look at them in a funny way, and the legend of the swamp witch. All written with a beautiful style that is intriguing and with great prose that perfectly represents Sam. 

The foundation of the story is Sam’s voice who tells us the story in a smart and grimly mocking way. While there is a lot going on, it’s foremost about her relationship with her sister and her mother and in some way with her father who killed himself when she was young. Those relationships are strained and complicated, but very realistic and intriguing. During the story we come to know more about these relationships, but we also get to know more about the past of the house. 

Through a diary Sam found we learn more about the maybe dark side of the house, which adds a cosmic horror element, combined with a philosophical and existential element. And through research Sam did about her family and what the house has shown her she pieces together their history, which we get to learn through other characters of her family and a black family, whose story Sam relates to us, which she has learned from the house. 

The set up is very smartly done and keeps the story very interesting and intriguing and mysterious. The latter mainly because she sees a very troubled and scary young boy, whom she has never seen before. It’s then she finds out the house also shows the future and things get stranger and scarier the further along Lizzy’s pregnancy comes. The descriptions of him are terrifying and also very disturbing and cruel. It has some animal cruelty that isn’t pleasant and Sam, like us can do noting about it, but watch what the house is showing us. 

That way, the house feels like a character as well. Does it show Sam deliberately things of the past and the future so that she can learn from them, or can even prevent the future for becoming the way the house has shown her? Or is it all random, like a house that dreams and has no control over what it shows? It all leads to an ironic ending. 

The story about a young girl that escaped slavery with her parents, Merriday, and her parents Jonah and Clementine and the swamp witch is a little story inside the big story, but plays a key part. Also the story of Sam’s father holds key elements to what is about to unfold. I think it’s all so cleverly done. It reads like a haunted house, with gothic elements and atmosphere, with a mystery, a creepy boy, a swamp witch and memory ghosts, but it is so much more than that. Not only the themes and how it unfolds, but also the way the story is yarned together and without even knowing, just like Sam, it feels like you are being sucked into the swamp, into events that are going to unfold without anything you can do about it to alter the situation. 

I really love this story that combines many themes, story arcs and a mystery, without being overextended. With just bits and pieces the story becomes clear and maybe even devastating and afterwards it can even feel like an inescapable fate. People doomed to fulfill the roles the house has seen and shown. It blends the present, the past and the future together in one house, intertwined and even touching. 

It Will Just Be Us is a great original novel with wonderful prose, an authentic voice, with stories within a story that hides secrets and with  a swamp witch who threatens them all.