Genre: Literary Fiction
Published: Penguin Press/Fig Tree, March 2025
My Rating: 3/5 stars
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been too many years since my last confession. These are my sins. I am loved and I don’t think I deserve to be loved. I am a betrayer. I am a bad friend. I am pretending to be someone else. I am tired all the time from the pretence. There are ten commandments and I am steadily making my way through violating all of them. There’s something inside my house and I think it wants to kill me. Does the Church still believe in exorcism? Can you exorcise my house? It’s not really my house anyway. Can you exorcise me?”
An interesting look at a modern day haunted life amidst adolescent anxieties and an increasingly constricting housing crisis. I appreciated a lot of the ideas, but didn’t feel it lived up to its full potential.
We follow young couple Elliot and Áine, having just moved in together into a shared rental flat that, on the surface, looks like the millennial dream. We follow them throughout the duration of their yearlong lease, as the cracks begin to appear in both the walls of their seemingly perfect dwelling, as well as their relationship.
This was one of my most anticipated literary releases of the year. The potential for a haunted-house novel examining millennial existential fears, set during a post-pandemic rental-crisis was endless. I was excited to see where the author would take it. Above all, I wanted the novel to capture that titular homesick feeling of wanting to return to a “feeling of home” regardless of location. A state that might not even exist anymore, or maybe never has. In its best moments, it did that, but there was a lot of (for lack of a better word) “empty space” in between those.
Empty space occupies a lot of the pages of this novel. There’s the emptiness that Áine feels about her life, her job and her daily routines. The increasingly empty silence between her and her boyfriend, and the empty conversations with her friends. The emptiness of a house that refuses to become a home, because it’s so clearly impermanent and “not yours”. It asks the question of our current crisis is a “housing”-one, a “homing-crisis”, or both. I loved these conversations about a situation I have lived, and continue to see many of my generation-fellows still live.
Personally, I’d wished there’d been a little more to fill the empty spaces though. As it stands, I Want to Go Home but I’m Already There has distinctly little plot, resulting in a dragging and often boring reading-experience. Although that thematically matches well, I feel like a bit of contrast with some more dark comedy or even more genuine horror from the “hauntings” would’ve elevated it even more.
Many thanks to Penguin and Fig Tree for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
Find this book here on Goodreads.
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