The Pink House by Rebecca Curtis

The Pink House Reviews

• 
  Remy

  i thought this was about ghosts
• 
  Diane S ☔

  Review to follow
• 
  Kori ☾

  Not as scary as I thought it would be. I related to the character in regards to her parents. They were tough.
  
  My father always told me that if I accepted any assistance from him after he’d paid for college I’d be a loser. Same.
  
  Paul was a piece of garbage before he moved into the apartment and after. I also wonder if the woman and her sister saw other ghosts, or maybe I am overthinking it. Engaging story but not horror at all. The author's writing keeps you hooked. I want to check out her other work.
  
• 
  Melki

  ". . . he pointed at my house and said, lightly, ‘You know, that house is haunted.’
  
  “ ‘Oh, really?’ I said.
  
  “ ‘Don’t worry.’ His hand moved across the manuscript. ‘He can’t do anything to you unless you give him permission.’
  
  “ ‘What do you mean, “give him permission”?’ I asked.
  
  “The man shrugged. The evening breeze blew his curly dark hair. My father honked the car horn.
  
  “The man looked down at his papers with embarrassment. ‘Oh, you know,’ he said. ‘Summon him with a Ouija board, ask him to tell you secrets, take his stuff. That’s true with any ghost. They can never affect you unless you address them and invite them to appear.’ He smiled disarmingly."
  
  At a dinner party, one woman tells an unusual ghost story - not scary by any means, but still, rather haunting.
• 
  Nikki

  3.5 stars, rounded up
  There is a lot to unpack in this story. Initially, I struggled to connect the first half of the narrator's "ghost" story with the second. The first details the circumstances that take her to the pink house where she encounters the so-called ghost and paints a cryptic portrait of her familial life, all of which makes no appearance at all in the story's second half wherein she enters into a lengthy relationship with a fellow writer whom she is not attracted to and does not love and, in recounting the tale, she poses the question of whether she ruined his life. In fact, I do think the two seemingly disconnected halves of the ghost story are related in that the first indirectly informs the second and reveals a great deal about the narrator herself.
  This isn't at all a conventional ghost story but one that seems to question the ways in which our own personal ghosts steer our choices and affect the lives of those with whom we interact, making ghosts of us all when it comes to agency and choice and the meaning we find or assign to our lives. The story feels meandering, is abstract and provocative, and is successful in challenging its reader to question the ties between the seemingly (by outward appearances, at least) disconnected parts of our varied and complicated lives.