After winning the 2023 British Fantasy Award for her novella The Queen Of The High Fields, Welsh writer Rhiannon Grist follows it up with Home Sick: a wonderfully weird and completely captivating psychological horror that will make you wonder whether something lurks behind even the most ordinary of encounters.
Running away from her old life in Edinburgh, Tamsin buys a solitary cottage in the middle of the Scottish countryside. She dreams of a quiet rural life: blending into the background at village fêtes, becoming a regular at the local pub, and maybe even becoming a completely new person. But when she arrives, she discovers that her cottage isn’t as solitary as she thought – she has a neighbour.
As Tamsin’s new neighbour becomes increasingly disruptive, she starts to wonder whether moving was a big mistake. Her anxiety only increases as she is surrounded by folktales and unsettling stories that fuel her insecurities and intensify her paranoia. Split into three sections, we follow Tamsin as she goes ‘Into the Community’, ‘Into the Fire’, and ‘Into the Woods’, each heightening the sense of unease and chipping away at Tamsin’s fragile sense of self – before she finds herself having to go ‘Into Hell’.
Grist excels at transforming everyday social anxieties into something genuinely unsettling, making readers question whether the real threat lies in Tamsin’s neighbour or in her own spiralling fears.
