Audrey's Door (2009)

Written by Sarah Langan
Harper - Available Sept 23, 2009

Audrey’s Door is the latest horror novel from Sarah Langan, who gave us The Keeper and The Missing, and it channels Polanski’s The Tenant along with a little bit of Rosemary’s Baby (which are both listed as inspirations in the preface) along with a creepy almost ‘Henry James’ attitude towards New York City and its inhabitants. Langan has a great talent for character development if, despite the intensity of the plots, good tends to triumph over evil (I never like that) and things get wrapped up nice and tidy in the last chapters of her novels. Nevertheless, Audrey Lucas is a creation with whom a chick can really identify; she’s insecure, complex, and caught up in a severely screwed up and macabre situation in her new apartment building where the other tenants are more than a bit odd...

Audrey Lucas has just broken up with her Indian fiancé Saraub, and moved into her own place in the historic Breviary building, built in the 19th century – a sprawling series of apartments cut from vast floor plans for the rich of days past when Harlem was still a rolling hillside ‘away’ from the city. Langan created a type of architecture – Chaotic Naturalism – which explains the macabre and nearly grotesque structure’s strange angles and lines and stained glass windows (which immediately calls to mind the works of Antonio Gaudi in Barcelona – I wonder if that’s where Langan got the idea?) Audrey makes friends with but one of her neighbors named Jayne, a young woman with perhaps as many problems as Audrey. But the others – they’re all far older and extremely reclusive. With only Jayne for occasional company, Audrey braves being single in the surprisingly beautiful and affordable apartment.

What I imagine The Breviary looks like (One of Antonio Gaudi's designs in Barcelona, Spain)

Between the break up, her mother’s coma, the obsessive compulsive disorder, and her highly stressful job at a top architecture firm, Audrey can barely keep her life together. When her sanity slowly starts to unravel because of hallucinations leading her to ‘build’ a structure within her own apartment, she knows she’s lost her mind. Because the only other alternative is that she’s actually being summoned to build a ‘doorway’ for the forces that want to escape the exceedingly haunted Breviary.

There’s something very The Shining-y about Audrey’s Door (the Kubrick film, not the King book) in that the building itself becomes a character. Langan’s dedication to making The Breviary a personality on its own is uncanny – the whole place is about as forceful as The Overlook Hotel – complete with its own ghosts, curses, and agenda. Using architecture as a major theme throughout (from explaining the strange nature of the building itself to the reasons Audrey feels compelled to erect a doorway) is not only impressively original but also tosses in a bit of educational material for us architectural idiots.

She’s not Salmon Rushdie, but there’s plenty of symbolism and intelligence to differentiate Langan’s work from, let’s say, your average jerk off horror novel. That’s why Langan’s getting the praise she is and why her novels are selling like hotcakes on a cold day. Langan’s voice is innovative, but provides enough familiar material that horror fans won’t get confused and forget what the hell they’re reading: they’re reading horror. And Audrey’s Door covers a lot of territory, and covers it at a fast, tense, and really impressive pace. She gets into the heads of her characters in a way that authors rarely have a talent to do; which is the saving grace that really makes her stories work well. The ‘horror’ tends to be fairly generic and expected – it’s good, but not obscene or pioneering. Its Langan’s actual talent as a writer that lends so much sophistication to her work, turning her horror fiction into actual bestseller ‘available in paperback form at the airport’, ‘on the top-ten list’ kind of stuff. Audrey’s Door is the so-far culmination of her literary efforts, and fans of her previous work will agree that this is her best story yet.