scary funny
Helen House by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is 4 x 6 x 0.2 inches (!) & 74 pages.
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It’s not necessary to read Helen House by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya in one go, but I just couldn’t help it. It commands full devotion. It’s as short as it is spellbinding as it is strange as it is scary. I feel like I didn’t breathe the whole time—and did you know I can hold my breathe a really long time, almost minutes, so this statement was maybe less hyperbolic than you thought. But then, I was at a dinner party Wednesday where I bragged about this and two other people could also hold their breath for like three minutes, which should have been humbling but instead felt like an unbelievable over-representation, population-wise of people really good at holding their breath.
The 30-something protagonist of Helen House is a jumble of deep and conflicting feelings. Mostly, she’s preoccupied with squaring a feverish, lusty yearning for sex with deep mourning of her sister. Just before a trip to visit her girlfriend’s family, she learns that this girlfriend has also lost her sister. It’s a coincidence she can never quite believe. She wants to feel a connection here, but instead there’s something off— like doesn’t this seem like an unbelievable over-representation, population-wise of people who have lost a sister?
The experience of reading Helen House, to me, was to thrillingly drown in questions like this. These were, you know, the typical motivating questions of a ghost story like, What’s going to happen next? and You’re not going to go in there, are you?!!! But also: How can a novel be racy and sad? And so efficient and so gothic, and so funny and scary?Â
Helen House reminds me most of Assembly, another sharp sliver of a Purse Book, where the protagonist meets their partner’s family. They both capture the hovering sensation of never quite settling, never quite believing what you’re seeing.
Also, amazing, the author Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya recommends a favorite Purse Book:
My go-to tiny book is, hands down, Dyke (geology) by the brilliant writer Sabrina Imbler. I mean, that title alone! I'm not a scientist or a science writer myself, but I am always drawn to lyrical and literary science writing, and Dyke (geology) blends and blurs genres in its explorations of queer dating and the life of a volcano. I could read it a million times and never tire of it!
(Also in case you didn’t see in the caption: this copy belongs to my friend ’Pemi Aguda, whose new book of short stories, Ghostroots, is as enchanting as it is eerie as it is enchanting. There’s one story that has a haunted house and it’s my favorite, even though they’re all my favorite.)Â