From the Editor, Book Launch, & Giveaway: Sammie Downing's The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs
Just in time for the holiday season, we’re thrilled beyond every form of language to welcome home a fairytale for the modern age: Half Mystic Press’ debut novella, Sammie Downing’s The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs. House settles into the world of young Miriam, a world where women carry houses stitched to their backs while men carry keys with the power to unlock them. Miriam’s nomadic family moves from clearing to clearing within a dark wood, but no matter how deep into the forest they travel, the haunted calls of Wild Things follow. As precious family heirlooms disappear and Father roams through the woods later and later into the night, Mother slowly loses her memory and Miriam begins to understand that her family might not be as human as it appears.
The Half Mystic team is full of joy to be hosting a giveaway for three paperback copies of House, featuring seven unique ways to win. Try your luck right here!
Also, if you’re in the area of Denver, Colorado, don’t miss the launch of House on the 20th of December, featuring readings by author Sammie Downing as well as supporter Francesca Downing, books for sale, & many lovely libations. It’s at Fin Art Co. from 7—10 P.M.; we would so love to celebrate this fearless & hopeful creation with you!
Thank you so much to every blogger & journal editor who hosted Sammie on the House blog tour. A few of our favourite quotes from reviews, interviews, guest posts, & more over the past two weeks…
“As I’ve grown older, I’ve struggled with conveying my memories to certain members of my family, often because those people don’t hold those same images, feelings or thoughts to be true. When I set about writing this novella, I wanted to avoid the trappings of fact versus fiction. Instead I wanted to create a world that felt, smelled and looked exactly like the world in which I’d grown up: the world from which I’d watched my father slowly disappear, in which I’d watched my mother stripped of her agency. I didn’t want to build this world within reality because, in the end, belief in reality is belief in fantasy. What I remember and what my mother remembers are two different universes. I wanted this novella to feel like a story passed down for generations until the truth of what happened begins to feel like myth.” An interview with Sammie Downing for the Half Mystic blog
“Consider a family that lives in the woods, tinged by ferality, distinctly separate from civilization. Consider it layered with a simple, mysterious fantastical element: mothers carry the houses as stitched appendages to their bodies, while their husbands are responsible for the keys that unlock them. Awed, and now full of questions? We are, too—and its poetic frame is part of what differentiates this dazzlingly fragmented novella from novels similarly set in the woods. … The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs doesn’t fall easily into one interpretation, and we admire this richness. As Downing manipulates the fantastical premise of this novella, we found ourselves asking, where does the power lie within a nuclear family? Where is the origin of a family’s strength? What does ‘home’ mean? Through the world she has constructed, Downing excavates the effect of generational trauma, where scars are physically inherited as fixtures within a woman’s House, and motherhood is cyclical, as Mother’s memory disintegrates and Miriam assumes a position at the helm of the family’s wellbeing. Although fathers hold the ability to unlock the house with their keys, it’s the women who maintain the meaning of home. This compact novella is an incantatory ode to the resilience of women in the face of a structure that leaves them powerless to control their independence. This is a piece that doesn’t hesitate to shift its own frame every few pages. Poem, novella, fairytale, parable—this unique story frames our expectations of ourselves and each other in a new, heartbreaking way. Downing has constructed a world in which the role we occupy in other people’s minds and hearts is not only predetermined but actively stifling and painful.” A review by Sophie Allen and Sarah Feng for Counterclock Lit
“Magic and reality stumble over themselves and each other, like the two girls haunted by their lineage. I think that's what makes a good fairytale—as one is ‘passed through an alternate dimension to create the other’ and as speaking to one, you ‘speak to the other backwards,’ you cannot find separation between them. How is a story not already a memory? How can you have an hourglass of magic without reality also slipping through? The story flickers from the present tense into glimpses of the future, like seeing ashes on the ground then looking right back over at the house it was. … I found myself growing then cutting myself down with every observation of daughters turning into mothers, the choices that neither one of them will ever admit to making. Halfway through the story, I thought of how unmagical, how unreal, reality really is. I lined up all the knives and placed them next to all the hips. This story brought out a strange sense of woman in me. It's more than a story about family or home or any of the things we think we belong to. This is a story about how the past moves you, even if you can't remember it. How it costs to keep time, even if you're not the one spending it.” A review by River Adams for Oh Shadows
“What I loved about House was the way family was examined. On one hand, it evokes such a nostalgia, how it makes the reader reflect on their own childhood—the good, but also the bad. In a way, it’s also a disillusionment of childhood: the small terrors we face as children, without even realising it; how fearless we are when we’re young and don’t know all the horrors of the world. On the other hand, it shows all the little things parents teach their children without realising it, either; it shows the way we are created through even the tiniest of actions our parents take. For me, House is a story about growing up, about losing the innocence of being young and turning into an adult, making difficult decisions and taking responsibility for them—even though, sometimes, it’s not fair to have to make these kinds of decisions. … I appreciate The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs for the question it raises: If you always carry your house with you, does this mean that you’re never far from home? Or is there more to a home than just the house you live in? I also loved the opposites Sammie Downing presented in this book: Miriam and Essie, so different from each other despite growing up beside the other one. Another opposite is civilisation vs. nature: what does it take to turn human into beast, Father into Wild Thing? How do we change if we leave all our rules behind?” A review by Hannah Rosenthal for Ink & Myths
“While there is a certain closure at the end of the novella, it is by no means a rigid tale that resists its own interpretation or extension beyond the official end by its readers. It is a novel about growing up but in a different vein than the fantastical adventures of Wendy Darling, Alice, Dorothy, and the like. In The Family That Carried a House on Their Backs, the dream world is not so much the escape from reality as much as it is the dark and enticing underbelly of it that some can’t help but succumb. … Much of Miriam’s behaviour and her thoughts resonated with both my past- and present-self. I found a sense of faith and comfort, for no matter how complex, and at times problematic, the relationships between mothers and daughters and sisters are, Downing shows us that it is these very relationships that become nodes and lead us to other relationships and the formation of a chosen family, and it is through speaking about trauma, whether realistically or allegorically, that we find comfort in knowing that we’re not alone.” A review by Margaryta Golovchenko for Anomaly Lit
“The mossy hyacinth notes of this mountain tea pairs perfectly with the gloomy-forest setting of this surreal fairytale novella about a world where women carry houses stitched to their backs, while men carry keys with the power to unlock them. This seemingly unbelievable premise becomes a haunting reality because of where the heart of this story lies: an imperfect family grasping to be a family with roots. While the tale is told from the POV of the eldest child, it is the overburdened and amnesiac Mother whom my heart aches for as she drags the House around to keep the family safe. Mother sure could do with a cup of tea!” A book-tea pairing by Melanie Lee for Mel’s Tea and Books
“This book hit in a lot of emotional places for me. Much of Miriam and Essie’s journey throughout this book felt familiar despite it being fantasy, but that’s what the best fantasy does. … More than anything, I want to hold Miriam and Essie close by and make sure nothing bad ever happens to them because they are so precious and sweet and young and even with what Miriam experiences in the book and begins to understand, I still want to protect her from the world. Too bad even in this book world, little girls don’t get to stay that way for long. … If you’re looking for an intriguing fantasy story—that might punch you in the heart—I definitely recommend checking this out.” A review by Sarah Perchikoff for Bookish Rantings
“Fairytales are gruesome and bloody. Grandmothers are ripped from the stomachs of wolves and little mermaids are faced with the ultimate question—to what lengths will you go in order to survive? When creating this story that I knew I needed a ruthless medium—a style capable of interrogating the pain that families experience in learning to love each other. Like Cinderella’s sisters cutting off their own toes or the Evil Queen forced to dance herself to death, I wanted to create something that would demonstrate in physical, visceral terms how far we are willing to go in order to belong.” A guest post by Sammie Downing for the Half Mystic blog
If you’d like to explore these moments & centuries of longing, please do enter Half Mystic’s giveaway for three paperback copies of The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs, ending in two weeks! We can’t wait to share HM’s bestselling volume to date with you. As well, to our Denver songbirds, don’t forget to attend the book launch on the 20th at Fin Art Co.—it’s free & open to the public!
& of course, if you don’t want to wait for the giveaway or the launch, you can purchase House for $15 (paperback) or $7 (PDF) today. To those who have already preordered the book: thank you so much! Your copy will be shipped to your doorstep, or sent to your email, by next week.
Darling songbirds, we hope you find in this book the space to become what you’ve been searching for, be it Housebearer or Wild Thing, sea or drought, holy ghost or heretic. Step into this House with us. Warm your hands on the fire. We’ve been waiting for you for so long.