Wormwood (or Caroma) by Layla Martinez, and translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott, is the story of a bitter grandmother and her bitter granddaughter living together in a haunted house. I’m just now realizing they are nameless.
It’s been a long time since I’ve read any Shirley Jackson, but this felt similar to her work. Because of this Jackson feeling, I assumed the house would be big. It’s not. Living in a small haunted house sucks.
It was built to be haunted by the grandmother’s father – an asshole trafficking pimp – who wanted to keep his wife trapped. Trapping women was kinda his thing. The house did keep her and her daughter (the grandma narrator) trapped, and later her granddaughter and great-granddaughter (the granddaughter narrator). I don’t know how intentionally evil the house was, but it ate away at everyone who lived in it. And it definitely sympathized with the women trapped there. The mothers and daughters may be trapped, but their husbands fare worse.
Understandably, the women basically become bitter witches. But they weren’t bitter about being stuck in a haunted house. They were bitter about classism and sexism (and they weren’t not bitter about the house haunted by bug saints). As witches, they curse the men who hurt the women in their lives. They also curse men for money. Gotta make a living.
If there is a plot, it’s about the granddaughter’s involvement in the disappearance of the boy she was nannying. He was a rich jerk boy in a family who had been rich jerks to her family for generations. Was she involved? It’s pretty easy to figure out.
But there isn’t much plot. The book isn’t long. It’s mostly about generational trauma becoming generational resentment about men abusing women and the rich abusing the not rich.
My biggest problem was that there are two first person narrators and it does not use quotation marks around dialogue. I read about 30 pages and got confused and irritated; then I reread the first pages and figured it out. Overall, I had fun with the pleasantly bitter and creepy little book.
