So now we come to the end of the road, wrote Babyface, Reid, and Simmons in the 90s, and so it is true here, that Psychopomp arrives at the end of a publishing road (can we publish books people love? Oh yes. Can we make enough money to continue? Oh no.).
But what a way to go out—a haunted house that is not remotely familiar to you. You have not walked these haunted halls. You don’t know what’s in that basement, I promise you don’t.
I first encountered Bernie Jean Schiebeling’s writing when they submitted to The Deadlands. We published “The Counting Ghosts,” in Issue #19 of The Deadlands. They have gone on to publish in Analog, The Drabblecast, Small Wonders, and more.
We’re absolutely delighted to share the cover of House, Body, Bird with you—but first, let’s talk to our author and get the VIBE of this place.
Birdie Goodbain, last of the House’s daughters, thought only the dolls were watching…
Raised in her family’s dollhouse museum, Birdie grew up surrounded by models of perfect daughters that she could never be, haunted by a father who refused to accept her and a mother who wouldn’t protect her. Birdie fled and didn’t look back.
A home, a girlfriend, a job—a summons to the House she left behind.
After ten years, Birdie returns to her mother’s welcoming arms, but something has changed in the centuries-old family home. Strange dogs hide in the foundations, her bedroom door locks on its own, her father won’t leave the basement—and something new and terrible lurks behind her mother’s eyes. She knows that she should leave, but eyes far older than the dolls’ have been watching her.
The House allowed Birdie to escape once. It refuses to let her shame the family again.
BJS sat down with me, ECT, and here’s what we discussed…
House, Body, Bird, is a surreal journey into a dollhouse life in more than one way. Becoming small in front of your parents, or being made small by your parents; there is a lot to unpack here, in terms of sexuality, gender, family expectations and obligations, and more. Was all of this in the forefront as you wrote, or how much developed as you got into the story itself?
I was absolutely thinking about gender roles and familial obligations while I was writing. From early on, I knew Birdie’s bedroom should be filled with mid-century nuclear families living in suburbia, and I knew that all the dolls were glued in place. Dollhouses can be powerful creative toys for kids’ stories (my playtimes had a lot of kidnappings, demonic possessions, and secret romances, which is how we ended up with this book), but if children aren’t allowed to explore ideas through their own play, then the dollhouses might as well just be educational dioramas prescribing what the world should look like. Moms go in the kitchen, Dads go in the big armchair, and Kids go outside where they can’t bother anyone. Dolls become tools for social reproduction, even more so than they already are.
One thing that developed as I wrote was the attic filled with Barbie’s Dreamhouses, which became a refuge for Birdie as a child. The dolls there aren’t glued down specifically because Birdie’s father doesn’t care about them as much: in his view, Barbies are commercial, modern, and cheap, but also socially relevant to the tourist rabble, and therefore they have an out-of-the-way exhibit in the dollhouse museum. However, what her father denigrates, Birdie finds liberating. She creates a counter-cultural space within her family’s house, and while it isn’t the same as true freedom—she’s stuck in the attic, the literary prison for madwomen who can look at the horizon but never reach it—the Dreamhouses give her a place to be herself and therefore survive until she can escape.
Rigid ideas of gender, sexuality, and family create the impression of a scouring, inescapable light. But bright lights cast dark shadows, and houses have so many shadows to hide in—especially if you’re small.
“Houses and children are very alike—constructed…” Do Birdie’s parents have difficulty with her because they made her, but ultimately didn’t control her?
Short answer: Yes.
Longer answer: It’s not just that they couldn’t control Birdie. It’s also that recognizing and, crucially, accepting their lack of control over Birdie—accepting that Birdie deserves autonomy—would mean having to reckon with their own life histories. Birdie’s parents have both led lives of constant, unhappy compromise. Her father suffered physical and emotional abuse from his own parents, which he never got any kind of closure about, and her mother struggled with an authoritarian marriage that isolated her and eroded her goals, dreams, and even hobbies. If they realize that Birdie’s choices are legitimate, then they’d also have to question what different choices they could have made for themselves. What sort of people, parents or otherwise, could they have been if they tried to command their own happiness instead of someone else’s?
This story takes the haunted house trope and turns it on its head; Birdie’s father tells her “we build on what came before us.” Is every piece of land haunted, and thus every home haunted, be they dollhouse or otherwise?
I’m setting aside the question of whether or not paranormal entities exist, because the world is huge and strange and I’ve seen so little of it. Here’s my experience with hauntings: places become haunted from the stories we tell about them. That story can be as simple as, “this room has a weird vibe” or as complicated as the whole of American history.
At one point in House, Body, Bird, Birdie bumps against a model of the kitchen at Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, where enslaved chefs—including James Hemings, older brother to Sally Hemings—cooked meals for one of America’s most famous founding fathers. That detail is meant to remind the audience of all the stories erased or sanitized by neat encapsulations of history. Even if mainstream narratives don’t acknowledge them as much, they persist in archival materials, archaeological artifacts, and/or oral histories (and this isn’t even getting into all the hard work done to study, preserve, and publicize these stories in fiction and nonfiction spaces), much like ghosts persist just out of sight, asserting their continued existence, disturbing day-to-day operations. A ghost is a creature with unfinished business, and historical injustices are full of unfinished business; think of all the modern American ghost stories about Native American burial grounds. One reason hauntings disturb us is because they remind us that we’re connected to a wider spiral of history and everyone who once lived in it. To everyone who is still living, still carrying these stories, still seeking justice. And it’s good to be disturbed this way. We have responsibilities to the past and the future.
Hauntings also don’t have to be negative. A line in HBB that I’m proud of is, “Suffering is not the only ghost.” Love and joy leave their own traces, and telling stories about that warmth changes the mood of a place as well.
In conclusion, not every home is haunted. But with your help, they could be!
If you could build a dollhouse that was the home of a fictional character, whose would it be?
My first instinct is to name a character with a very cozy home, like Bilbo Baggins’ Bag-End or the Moomins’ Moominhouse, but I think then I’d spend a lot of time staring wistfully at them instead of writing. We also already have a clear idea of what these homes look like, so there wouldn’t be much invention involved. It would probably be more fun to create a dollhouse for a character whose home we never see so that we can speculate on the floor plan, furnishings, decor, etc. A “dollhouse as fan fiction” situation. And in that case, I’d choose Columbo. What color scheme did he and his wife pick out? How plush is the dog bed for Dog? And is he actually telling the truth about misplacing his pens? (No. They’re well-organized in this coffee mug.)
What did you discover during the writing that you had not planned for?
The biggest plot change that I made to the story was Birdie’s confession to Lila about her situation (i.e., honey, my parents shrunk me, and not in the fun family movie way). In the first draft, Birdie told Lila that she was in trouble and needed Lila to come get her—and that was it. I thought keeping Birdie’s transformation a secret from Lila would be more suspenseful and dramatic, but it didn’t sit right with me once I’d finished the scene. Birdie, who tried her best to keep Lila out of danger, was now deliberately withholding information that could protect Lila? Not to mention, Birdie’s character development involves her learning to open up to Lila, so failing to do so at such a pivotal moment would have been a real missed opportunity on my part. I think this is a version of Ursula Le Guin’s thoughts about artists mistakenly seeing pain as interesting and intellectual, while happiness is mundane and stupid. We may think that secrets and mystery make a relationship exciting, but really the everyday work of communication, of allowing ourselves to be known, is what creates a fun, loving, and worthwhile partnership (and talking to my partner is actually how I was able to figure out that the scene needed to be fixed in the first place!). I’m happy I got the chance to articulate that through Birdie and Lila.
Also, figuring out the architecture of the house to make the final action sequence work was a real bear. I looked at a lot of Victorian house floor plans, which were way too sensible for what I’d gotten myself into. I ended up drawing my own layout on an index card with a lot of scribbled-out sections and arrows tracking the movements of different characters. It’s still a little wonky, but the house itself is meant to be a series of ill-advised renovation projects, so it works.
Would you ever want to be made small to live in a dollhouse?
I live with an adorable house cat named Mochi who has highly-developed hunting instincts—so, no. I’ve seen what she does to her favorite stuffed raccoon. I would not survive.
Reader, will you survive? We hope you do, because after the cover (here it comes), you get the all mighty preorder button. We hope you’ll grab an ebook or print copy of our final-for-the-moment print novella. Supporting small press is more vital every day in this oppressive world of ours.
Our cover for House, Body, Bird comes from the talented John G. Reinhart, whose art has graced From These Dark Abodes, One Message Remains, and Starstruck as well. The text design is by Christine M. Scott, with input from inkshark. It takes a village to build a haunted house.
The truly astonishing news is: you can add this book to YOUR shelf. You can possess and be possessed by House, Body, Bird. You can do it right now.
Thank you for loving the books we have published at Psychopomp. Thank you for supporting this final print edition! Will we ever return to the land of really cool print books? We sure do hope so. If you’d like to help that happen, buy this book! Support our quarterly fiction zine, The Deadlands! Every little bit helps—no matter how little you are, you can do the thing. House, Body, Bird proves it to be true!
