What Marian doesn’t realize is that she’s not the owner of this house—she’s its slave. Summer is spent on her knees, waxing floors, dusting frames, repairing damage, letting her family die without batting an eye. To her, cleaning is an act of ownership, but the cruel truth is that the Allardyces had money and she doesn’t and nothing will change that. She can live in their 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,
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