Living a Gothic Heroine’s Nightmare: An Exclusive Guest Post from Trang Thanh Tran, Author of She Is a Haunting, Our March YA Book Club Pick 

This riveting debut will keep you up at night and is perfect for fans of Within These Wicked Walls and White Smoke. This haunted house horror about a girl visiting Vietnam and staying in the French colonial house her Ba is restoring explores themes like queerness, generational trauma, and colonialism, and it will haunt you long after you’ve turned the final page.  Keep reading to discover the authors and stories that have inspired Trang Thanh Tran as they set out to write their book.

I desperately wanted to be home, somewhere else, but I had no answer for where that was exactly. Writing a ghost story seemed like the perfect escape: make it a fictional character’s problem! But I really wanted it to hurt for you, reader. The first time I felt a piece of my heart on the page was Emily X.R. Pan’s The Astonishing Color of After. It had blown me away years earlier with its honest, beautiful prose exploring grief and belonging. I sought that same emotional resonance for my main character Jade as she visited Vietnam against her wishes.  

In the fun tradition of tropey horror titles, the novel was originally called The Haunting of Jade Nguyen. As I wrote however, it became a family story. She isn’t the only one haunted or haunting. Jihyun Yun’s poetry collection Some Are Always Hungry was a fixture on my desk and a major source of inspiration because of how it examined immigration, survival, and intergenerational trauma. Each poem was through the lens of food, and that’s how I saw Jade’s story playing out, too, in the greedy French colonial house her dad wants to reclaim. 

While the show The Haunting of Hill House delivered on the visuals and complex family dynamics I adored, it’s Shirley Jackson’s book that whipped up the perfect claustrophobic environment. Trapping readers with sparing prose that still suggests a house’s malevolent grandeur was a fun challenge while working on this novel. I hope Nhà Hoa makes Hill House proud.