A review by readthesparrow
The Call Is Coming from Inside the House: Essays by Allyson McOuat

hopeful reflective medium-paced

3.0

This review is based on a digital ARC provided by the publisher.

REVIEW

I wanted to love The Call Is Coming from Inside the House, I really did.

The cover–which is what initially caught my eye–is gorgeous. It’s haunting, it’s weird, and I wouldn’t say no to owning it as a print.

The summary sealed the deal: queer essays about identity through the lens of horror, 90’s pop culture, and true crime?

That’s so far up my alley it’s in my house.

The Good

McOuat’s prose is vibrant and evocative–when she’s talking about moments from her life.
The images of her running from a coyote, supporting her children through their first experience of loss and grief, and waking up to a man standing at the end of her bed are striking, real, alive.

Those moments are the ones I enjoyed reading, and it’s those moments that I will remember.

My favorite essay, by far, was “The Harbinger (Death at Every Corner).” McOuat examines her extreme anxiety and how she began to have a healthier approach to the voice in her head that warned her about danger at every corner. It was relatable to me in a way that a lot of writing about anxiety isn’t.

However, there were two main sticking points that kept me from absolutely loving the collection: a lack of connection and uninteresting analysis.

The Unconnected

Besides the broad theme, the collection lacks a consistent connecting thread that supports the reading experience; in other words, a consistent, traceable arc from beginning to end.

For example, take In the Dream House, a book with a very similar premise: examining a queer woman’s life through pop culture, horror, urban legend, and thriller tropes (though ItDH is highly experimental with form). ItDH is sustained essay to essay and as a whole with a central connective thread: Machado and the woman’s relationship, which progresses and changes.

The Call Is Coming from Inside the House does not have a central thread.

From essay to essay we oscillate from from fertility treatments to home ownership to divorce to family oral history to the anxieties of teenage girlhood back to her pregnancy.

I could follow each individual essay’s narrative fine, but jumbled snapshots of McOuat’s chronology paired with wildly fluctuating topics made for a disjointed reading experience when considered as a whole.

And individual essays rarely stayed focused. Even my favorite chapter isn’t immune.

“The Harbinger (Death at Every Corner)” begins with two pages talking about Frozen, discussing queercoding and the Hayes Code. Three pages in we finally get around to anxiety (as per the essay’s title, seeing death around every corner). Frozen connects tangentially a few pages later, when she compares how she handled this anxiety to being shut in a castle.

When I finished reading, I had a bevy of questions. What relevance does the Hayes Code have to the idea of the harbinger and intrusive anxiety? Why bother bringing in Frozen, as the harbinger and the final girl tropes (the latter having been mentioned once) could have said much the same while keeping the essay focused around thematically connected topics?


The Boring

I’m not saying that it would be impossible to connect Frozen with the harbinger trope, or that essays shouldn’t bring together disparate concepts.

The reason I have issues is because the analysis of these two concepts is, well… shallow.

Elsa being queercoded? I read that same exact reading on Tumblr a decade ago (seriously, see this post from 2014).

The titular Harbinger trope? Purely exists to explain why McOuat calls her anxiety the Harbinger. Personifying her anxiety as the Harbinger is fine–I like it–but that’s where the lens stops.

There’s also no analysis or connection made between the harbinger concept and Frozen.

To quote the summary, the “examination through the lens” McOuat is doing here boils down to 'my anxiety feels like the harbinger, and I reacted to it like Elsa did, which was by hiding myself away (also did you know Elsa is kinda queercoded?).'

Again, the reason why “The Harbinger (Death at Every Corner)” was my favorite is because when she actually discusses her life, her intrusive thoughts, and how they impacted her as a functioning person and as a mother, the writing is really good. It’s intimate and intense and emotional.

Her experiences speak to me as a person who also deals with those issues, and the framing of the Harbinger could have gone in a really interesting direction!

But it just didn’t, and as a result, the analysis part of the essay–half of the whole essay!–bored me.

Many of her analysis struggles similarly. Her takes are, often, Freshman Intro to Horror level basic.

Her queer and feminist analysis of tropes–such as covens, final girls, and the man at the end of the bed–are both surface level and common knowledge for any queer/feminist horror enjoyer.

For example:
  • Covens are akin to female/queer community and dressing witchy = flagging.
  • Final girls are the “right” kind of victim because they fight back.
  • The man at the end of the bed is voyeurism: the invasion of privacy.

There was nothing new or interesting vis a vis her analysis that made me think about a trope, story, or piece of media in a new or fresh or interesting way.

As a result, I’ve got nothing to intellectually chew on, leaving me, yes, bored for, like, half of every essay.

FINAL THOUGHTS

While I’ve been critical of The Call is Coming from Inside the House, I do think it’s a solid 3 star read. I like McOuat’s prose. When she talks about her life, it’s vivid, emotional, and poignant. She’s a vivid storyteller, and I’d certainly love to read more of her personal essays in the future. I’d go so far as to say I’d love a memoir from her.

Just… temper your expectations when it comes to the “lens” part.

Thank you to ECW Press for providing a digital ARC via Netgalley. 
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