I really liked this!
The haunted house trope has been through a lot, and, even so, I think that this story was able to use it wisely.
Stories like The Wizard of Oz, The Last House on the Left, slashers like Halloween and Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and more recent stories like The Blair Witch Project all depict people leaving their houses, doing immoral things, and being torn apart because of that. That’s why, in old horror movies, if you have sex you die—you disgusting degenerate! —and only the virgin, The Final Girl, survives. The home was your refuge, your sanctuary. Evil always came from outside, like in The Exorcist. Although we still see stories like this, like MA or the Wrong Turn reboot or Midsommar, this is not the rule anymore. After the 2008 Subprime crisis, and with the always-growing numbers of homeless people in America, the house is not a safe place anymore. On the contrary. Therefore, came the Paranormal Activity franchise, The Conjuring, Sinister, The Cabin in the Woods, Don’t Breathe, HUSH, The Lodge, Hereditary, Vivarium (which really looks like this story btw), His House, and You Should Have Left. Dorothy is not safe in Kansas anymore. She may very well just stay in Oz.
And this story does a great job capturing this zeitgeist. Like the aforementioned His House, that used the home trope to tell a story about war refugees in Europe, Keeping House uses the trope to talk about domestic violence.
I like how subtle it is. We never know if she’s delirious or not. Reminded me of The Turn of the Screw and The Others.
I do have some issues though.
In their first night there, after they eat pizza takeout, all the dishes of the house appear in the sink, and she thinks, “Have I used this? I don’t remember. I must be tired”. WOW! How tired can someone be? That should have raised red flags immediately. Used dishes in your sink like that can only mean two things: ghosts or someone secretly living in the ventilation system.
I didn’t like that the story told us that all the women in her dreams may have lived in the house. It was unnecessary. That’s looking down on the reader, saying that we are dumb and need explanation for everything.
The teeth on the door frame, and the house having jaws were uncalled for. Felt like deus ex machina. It was unnecessary; she could have been kept in the house by many other means. It was also bad for the story, because it just destroys the ambiguity that was built in the other 99% of the story.
And I just got nerdy again. :P :P :P
P.S.: Funny that the writer and the narrator have the same surname and (I think) are not related.
P.S. 2: In case you're wondering: yes, I watched/read all the stories mentioned above ;)
This episode's timing was superb for my own life as I'm in the process of buying a house and thinking about the move. Really chilling. I felt that for being a story about a haunted/haunting house, the story's horror was as much the second shift and gaslighting. Unsure precise best practices for spoiler tagging here yet, so tagging the rest...
I wondered whether the house was numbing Matt to the dishes, etc., as a way of eating into him or whether it was initially obliviousness until it wasn't. A line that particularly stuck with me was "but the difference was that he liked electronics, and neither of them liked laundry."
This encapsulates patterns I've seen time and again in how men/women split up chores when living together. Not that the men don't also do chores that they don't like, but that it starts with chores they enjoy and, for women, it rarely starts with the chore they enjoy. Not a universal, just a pattern.
Re: Álex's comment on the dreams -- I actually enjoyed the way they tied to things appearing, though I felt like there might've been a way to blur that a little more.