From the immaculate lawn next door it is the tarp that offends. Blue plastic, lashed over the third-storey turret of a pink Queen Anne mansion, working loose in the breeze because the twenty-two-year-old inside keeps meaning to see to it. The porch below has been wrapped in caution tape by the city. The man next door, sweating in salmon-pink shorts at sixty degrees, has waited eight years to be allowed to say something about it, and the death of the old woman who slept under that tarp has finally given him permission. The Sisters of Crimson House by Melissa Anderson Sweazy opens with a house being judged, and spends four hundred pages establishing that everyone doing the judging has a skull in a wall somewhere.
Memphis, October 2008. Charley Bryde is the fourth generation of a psychic dynasty and the only woman in it born without a Seeker’s Star scarred into her palm. Her mother could sing a sickness quiet. Her grandmother could hold a stranger’s coat and follow it to its owner. And her aunt looks at a person and sees the accident that will finish them. Her sister lets the dead speak through her body and is the most powerful medium the family has produced. Charley reads tarot in a hotel bar and is very good at reading faces, which is not the same thing and everyone knows it.
What the Sisters of Crimson House Inherit
The inheritance is a building. Her grandmother is three months dead, her parents eight years, and what she has been left is a mansion that eats every dollar the family’s ghost-tour business earns. The Sisters of Crimson House by Melissa Anderson Sweazy is unusually clear-eyed about this. The supernatural is an enterprise: tours through a hall where a colonel glowers from the staircase, readings by appointment, tickets at fifty dollars a head for a revived Halloween demonstration that everyone agrees is the last chance to keep the roof on.
Then the sister comes home. Miranda has spent eight years abroad with the aunt, performing in European towns Charley tracked with a red marker on a map, and she walks back in with nothing but the clothes she is wearing. What follows is the best thing in The Sisters of Crimson House by Melissa Anderson Sweazy: two women who love and resent each other, fed different portions of the same family secret, circling the question of which of them has been lied to more.
The Neighbours Who Want to Save the Street
Howard and Peyton Lovell chair a nonprofit founded, in Howard’s own account, to protect the block from people like the Brydes. Their house is kept to museum standard: pipe organ, grandfather clock, and a bookshelf of volumes nobody has ever opened, shop stickers intact. Their offer for the mansion is above market. And their method is to touch your arm gently and explain that you are being spared a burden too large for you.
It is preservation with better manners, and Sweazy plays it beautifully straight. The Lovells are not villains; they sincerely believe a work of art is being wasted on a child, and they will narrate the block’s history with the enslaved labour that built it left tactfully out. The scene in which Miranda walks uninvited into their bedroom and starts taking a wall apart with a fireplace poker is the funniest and most alarming stretch in the novel, and it settles the eviction question by other means.
Melissa Anderson Sweazy and the Cost of Being Told Nothing
Underneath the business troubles, The Sisters of Crimson House by Melissa Anderson Sweazy is about a family that decided a child was safer ignorant and never revisited it. Charley has spent her life mourning a mark she does not have, being told she does not need one, and holding a version of her parents’ deaths that does not survive contact with anyone who was there. When lines do begin to open on her palm, cut in and bleeding one at a time, every new ability arrives with a piece of information somebody chose to withhold.
That is the engine, and it is a good one, because the novel understands that revelation is not the same as relief. Each answer Charley wins makes her family harder to love. By the end she holds something no gift can make bearable: the knowledge of what was traded, and by whom, so that she could exist at all. A debt was settled on her behalf by somebody nobody thought to ask.
There is also a superb piece of low, domestic horror at its centre. A message is left at a murder scene, four words in blood, and Charley carries them for three hundred pages as an occult riddle. The answer has been on the kitchen shelf the whole time, printed on a box of supermarket tea. It is the cheapest trick here and the most effective, and it tells you how the novel works: the dread lives in ordinary objects, not in the woman in black with the sword.
Where the Book Stops Trusting Itself
Three things hold The Sisters of Crimson House by Melissa Anderson Sweazy back:
- One conversation carries the whole mythology. Late on, an aunt talks for a chapter and hands the reader everything at once: what the thing is, where it came from, who has been carrying it, and why nothing could have gone differently. After three hundred pages of showing, the seminar lands hard.
- The romance is wired into the plot machinery. The marks appear when the visiting skeptic touches Charley’s hand, so the book must keep engineering contact, and the feeling reads as scheduling.
- The climax reaches for a gun, a blunt object in a novel that has been patient and eerie throughout, and the reckoning for it amounts to a quiet private arrangement twelve months on.
Astrid and Zavier, the two friends who keep the business alive, are also more delightful than developed. Sweazy adores them. She does not give them much to want.
For the Group
The Sisters of Crimson House by Melissa Anderson Sweazy is built for a room full of people who like to argue about families. Start with the obvious one: was Charley protected or robbed? Every adult in her life withheld the truth to keep her safe, and the novel shows that the reasoning was sound and that the result was a young woman who did not know who she was. Most groups will split, and the split will be about their own families.
Then the harder question, about the grandmother: what is a person permitted to do to protect a child, and does a gift you never asked for oblige you to use it? The guide in the back is good on the sisters; the sharper conversation is about the generation above them.
Worth knowing: a first novel by a screenwriter who also hosts a monthly podcast of true ghost stories, and it shows. Scenes are staged rather than described. Nobody stops to explain a haunting.
Content notes: murder and mutilation, strangling, a knife used in public, a bullet and lasting paralysis, fire as a weapon, poison, a corpse in water, remains hidden in plaster, a child killed on a road, drowning, bereaved children, possession, drink at the wheel, a childhood in care, and constant swearing.
To keep going: Gothictown by Emily Carpenter matches the Southern town with opinions about newcomers, and The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix shares the comic register. It Was Her House First by Cherie Priest takes the property dispute somewhere stranger, Mazywood by Tananarive Due is the better book on what a place remembers, and The Cliffs by J. Courtney Sullivan suits anyone who came for the psychic and stayed for the family history.
What It Leaves Behind
The Sisters of Crimson House by Melissa Anderson Sweazy is set in a real Memphis, and the choice pays off. The sisters’ childhood bungalow looks onto Overton Park, with its old-growth forest inside the city, its lake and its legend of a woman in blue, and the novel uses all three without nudging the reader. The city is not scenery. It is the reason the Brydes could ever sell a ticket.
What lingers is the ending, which declines to be a victory. Charley gets the mark, the gift, the answers and a future, and The Sisters of Crimson House by Melissa Anderson Sweazy has the nerve to hand her the invoice with them. There is a long line of people waiting to speak to her now. She will be listening for the rest of her life.