‘There’s something wrong with this place’: Lisa Unger on the fear we can’t get past

Ever thought there’s something weird about a house or the people in it? You’re not alone – and Lisa Unger knows why.

The building was a beautifully appointed pre-war gem, with a uniformed doorman and a green awning, nestled in Murray Hill on Park Avenue in New York City.

This is not the fictional building The Windermere from my new thriller The New Couple In 5B. This is the real place where my aunt lived when I was kid, a place that seemed like the ultimate city apartment. It was sun-washed and airy, with a working fireplace and stunning views of the Chrysler Building. But my aunt was a complicated woman, so visits there were always layered and confusing. Maybe because of that dichotomy, this was the apartment that surfaced when I started writing my novel. A place that was at once beautiful, a dream, and yet underpinned by something dark, something unpredictable.

‘It seems like their luck is about to change’ … but Lisa Unger has other ideas for her characters in The New Couple In 5B.

Rosie and Chad Lowan are a young couple living in New York City. Rosie is a true crime writer and Chad is an actor. Their luck has been all bad recently. She’s wrestling with the proposal for her second book. He can’t find work that’s meaningful to him. They are struggling to start a family. But when they receive a surprise inheritance of a magnificent apartment in an iconic New York City building, it seems like their luck is about to change. The Windermere has other ideas. When one of Rosie’s new neighbours turns up dead, she knows that she has to dig deeper into the dark history of this complicated place before she and her husband fall under its spell.

Place has such an impact on our lives. If you think about your childhood home, you probably remember details very vividly. How the light came in through the kitchen window, or the sound the refrigerator made. But most of all, you likely recall the feeling of being a child in that place – whether you were safe or loved. Or not. Houses, buildings, a fictional town, or parcels of land often figure into my novels. The places we choose. Or the places that choose us. Why do we fall in love with a certain house? Or why when we walk into another might we feel repelled? In my novels, places hold energy. They can become characters with a part to play in a story.

‘There’s something wrong with the house’ … it certainly seems that way for Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall in the film adaptation of The Shining.

“There’s something wrong with the house,” is a sort of trope I suppose. We can all think of books and films where the dwelling is a particularly bad actor: The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson; The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson; The Shining by Stephen King. But what has always struck me about these stories is that often we find it’s not the places that are haunted, but the people. In fact, the dwellings are often the victims, acting from the pain they hold within their walls. And the residents of the building are vulnerable to the darkness – either because of their mental fragility, sensitivities to energy, addiction, or some other feature that makes them receptive. It’s that intersection that has always interested me. Much as we might choose an abuser as a spouse because we come from an abusive childhood, might we choose a house because it meets a particular need we have, whether or not we are consciously aware of that need?

In the writing of The New Couple In 5B, Rosie emerged as a character who was uniquely vulnerable to a place like The Windermere. Estranged from her family of origin, unable so far to start a family of her own with her husband, and having run from a traumatic childhood, she is a person looking to create a home. She’s distanced herself from her parents because she views them as con artists and charlatans. Her father claims to be a faith healer. Her mother reads tarot cards for a living. And her sister is plagued by prophetic dreams. Rosie has run far from this, choosing a life of academics and research, the truth as she sees it. She doesn’t believe that she, as her father claimed, has any special abilities. And yet she sees things in The Windermere that no one else (except the resident medium) does. Are they ghosts? Is there “something wrong” with the Windermere? Is Rosie a “seer” like her father believes? Or is she unstable, the child of trauma and gaslighting, now losing her grip in a stressful adult moment?

‘Are they ghosts?’ … Rosie doesn’t know what she’s seeing in The New Couple in 5B.

The universe is a complicated place. And there are for more questions than answers about perception, the human brain and its capabilities, paranormal (whatever that means) activity and who might be sensitive to frequencies from the beyond. But what’s known is that we are energetic beings; our actions, thoughts, and feelings create vibrations. It’s not difficult to imagine that the places we build, and in which we dwell, hold those vibrations, and then seek to express them, much in the way an injured child might act out after abuse or neglect. It’s possible that’s why as readers we never tire of the theme “there’s something wrong with the house”.

Because it’s a story, not about places, but about us, and the lives we live within those walls.

The New Couple in 5B by Lisa Unger is on sale now, published by HQ Fiction.

Tell us about the role of places in your favourite fiction at the Sunday Book Club group on Facebook.

And check out our Book of the Month, Abigail Dean’s Day One. Get it for 30% off the RRP at Booktopia with the code DAYONE.

T & Cs: Ends 30-Apr-2024. Only on ISBN 9780008389277. Not with any other offer.

Originally published as ‘There’s something wrong with this place’: Lisa Unger on the fear we can’t get past