The first time I read “Diavola” by Jennifer Thorne I started it on the train, thinking I’d pass the time of the trip and pick it up again the next day. Instead, I found myself finishing it six hours later, curled up on my couch, having ignored absolutely everything else after getting home. Captivating? Sure. Terrifying? Absolutely. A great horror novel; worth the read, I thought. But now I’d finished it, and that was that. Except I couldn’t let it go. Now, more than two years later, I’m still turning it over and over in my head.
At first glance, “Diavola” is a pretty typical haunted house story. An extended family vacation brings Anna Pace, her parents, her siblings, their partners and her two nieces to a picturesque Tuscan villa. The locals are cagey about the house, there are strange noises haunting the night, doors open and close by themselves and there’s a locked tower the family is not supposed to enter. But the dread, the tension, the bone-deep foreboding starts even before Anna steps foot into Villa Taccola.
Anna times her arrival to the family vacation to get peace before having to deal with the constant barbs and undermining comments from her family, but the dread soon sets in. When Anna is finally with the rest of the Paces, it is just what she expected: Her family asks after her ex-boyfriend, wishing he was there. They bring up every possible past mistake (some real, some imagined) and blatantly wait for her to ruin the vacation. Christopher, her brother’s current boyfriend, tells her he was promised, “If shit did go down, it would one hundred percent be [Anna] doing it.” Just like a haunting, their family dynamic is obsessed with the past, unable and unwilling to move forward, to see how adult Anna may differ from her 22- or 15- or 8-year-old self. Much worse than the sadistic Renaissance ghost bent on killing our main character and feeding from her life force is the rest of the Pace family, who have used Anna as their scapegoat for decades.
As the family settles into their vacation, a haunting that starts as moving shadows and strange noises escalates, as all hauntings do. Christopher becomes obsessed with what’s in a locked tower room until he can’t take it anymore and uses a cursed key to open the door, only to find a dusty, abandoned, windowless tower. Invisible hands shove Anna’s sister to the floor. Food rots. Flies fill the house. When she’s left alone to babysit her nieces, one ends up trapped in the tower room. The house is inexplicably ransacked while, seemingly, still locked.
As the haunting intensifies, so does tension among the Paces. Christopher resents Anna for her brother’s attention, everyone resents the = parents for how they hold money over their heads, Anna’s sister and brother-in-law fight over the best ways to raise their children. This culminates in Christopher leaving early and the whole family with an entire day they can’t remember.
Through it all, the growing danger reflects the existing family dynamics. Surely it has to be Anna who threw furniture around the villa, or who is holding doors shut and trapping her family in their rooms – as Anna’s twin brother, Benny, says to her: “This place only ever feels haunted when you’re around.” Nicole, her sister, rewrites events to paint Anna as the villain. Her father buries his head in the sand. And the whole family tries to shelter their mother from it all to spare her feelings.
When Anna can’t be blamed, the Pace family find a new scapegoat: her young niece, Waverly. Each time Waverly’s mother tries to blame her she objects, claiming her mother is always blaming her, never believing her. Anna can see the role her niece is being forced into, and is helpless to stop it. Maybe, like Waverly, Anna objected to such treatment when she was younger, but learned how futile it was to object. Even when Anna tries to reassure Waverly about her actions, saying, “I would have done the same thing,” she can only do so with no other adults around. Waverly heartbreakingly replies, “Mommy says I’m like you. But she only says it when she’s mad at me.” Later she directly asks Anna, “What’s so bad about you, Anna? I don’t get it.” And so Thorne makes it clear that the story continues, highlighting the cyclical nature of abuse.
Horror is inherently a genre interwoven with themes of abuse, a haunting or possession makes its victim question reality the same way intentional gaslighting in an abusive relationship does. Characters are sure they closed that door, sure they put something back where it belongs, sure they didn’t pile all the furniture into a tower in the center of the room. But the evidence tells them otherwise. Characters are dismissed and belittled and disbelieved. How often have we seen horror movies in which someone says they have a bad feeling yet they’re ignored until it’s too late? The best horror leans into this, whether on the personal or systemic level.
Thorne masterfully interweaves the domestic and supernatural threats to Anna’s happiness, as well as her sanity, creating a captivating read. I have had many. The reason I haven’t been able to get “Diavola” out of my head lies in its ending. Anna is not just the scapegoat, the victim, the person to which our Renaissance ghost attaches herself. Instead, she is the final girl, triumphantly emerging from the narrative vindicated, bloody and free.
A version of this story appeared originally on the Porter Square Review of Books. Buy “Diavola” from Porter Square Books.
