house, she can wax their floors, but she’ll never belong. Before Marasco, Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson had written haunted-house books—The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and Hell House (1971) are both genre classics, but neither had a thing to say about money. They were about psychic investigators going to abandoned mansions to figure out how they got so spooky. Marasco and his now-forgotten best seller focused on the real issue for most people with a haunted house: “Can I get my investment back?” Marasco was the first American writer to bring anxieties about class, mortgages, and
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