The Birthing House - Christopher Ransom

The idea behind Christopher Ramson’s novel is a daring and original one for a haunted house story – it’s not the death that one need fear here as much as birth. It’s a sound enough concept. What other event is more significant than death? What other event involves pain, blood and violent upheaval to one’s life? What other event lies on the boundary between existence and non-existence? One is an ending, the other a beginning and The Birthing House fully draws on all the implications of the unknown that lies in both, twisting them into a troubling and darkly erotic horror story.

Whether by suggestion or through his own personal fears, weaknesses and relationships problems, Conrad’s flaws and failings become tied up with or transferred onto an old house he has bought in Wisconsin. Its history as a birthing house, where midwives fulfilled the function of bringing new life into the world in the absence of a nearby local hospital, is uncovered in a book of old photographs, where one of the former inhabitants even resembles his wife Joanna. When Jo becomes pregnant seemingly without him being involved in the process, it sets off his fears and insecurities in a horrifying manner.

The characters can be rather unpleasant and their behaviour is often quite distasteful, but the manner in which those flaws in their character are exploited only makes the novel even more interesting. It’s not just the past of the house that matters here, the memory of Conrad’s first teenage love Holly is also vital for the purposes of the story, a past that Conrad hasn’t dealt with. Those insecurities are also directed towards the young, pregnant daughter of his neighbours, the novel capturing in them a wider sense of mystical forces and primal instincts associated with procreation, birth and motherhood. The same force drives the novel, which draws a deep erotic charge from the material and twists it into something much more terrifying and real than your average ghost story. Clearly drawing deeply from personal primal anxieties, Ransom expands this into something terrifying and revolting, keeping an air of confusion and ambiguity through the mounting horror right through to the climax.