Greentree, Oregon, is the kind of affluent city that one imagines embracing charity. A bell-swinging Santa on the grocer’s curb here, corporate checks to the cancer fund of choice there. A place where people can feel good about themselves once a year. Touring her picturesque new town, Carina, the protagonist of Carson Winter’s horror novella A Spectre is Haunting Greentree (2024), worries that she’s “a guest, a burden, a charity case” (p. 30).
What is the purpose of charity? When “charity” is linguistically recast into “charity case,” care becomes pity. It centers the giver rather than the receiver. But, if we consider charity from a Marxist perspective, as Dean Spade does in his guidebook Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (2020), the two begin to bleed together. Spade distinguishes charity from mutual aid as the glorification of the rich as decision-makers about “who gets the help, what the limits are to that help, and what strings are attached” (p. 20). Charity is, in short, a “Band-Aid on the massive social wound that their greed creates” (p. 21). A Spectre is Haunting Greentree knows all about the rich who hand out favors—and who expect a hand in return.
As the title—molded after the famous first line of The Communist Manifesto (1848)—signals, author Carson Winter shapes his horror novella around the friction between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. In literalizing Marx and Engels’s spectre, he cuts to the novella’s central concern: resistance to bourgeois violence. That’s not to say that A Spectre is Haunting Greentree drowns in economic theory. The result is quite the opposite: its simple premise and embrace of gore go a long way to maintain an entertaining story. Horror isn’t broke and Winter doesn’t fix it.
Idyllic and quaint (as if the Stardust isn’t enough to prove it), Greentree initially charms Carina. The contrast to her hometown of Baltimore couldn’t be stronger, not only in aspect but in significance. Her move represents a new life. When we first meet Carina, she is recently separated from her husband of 10 years, Steve, whose abuse leaves her with debilitating panic attacks. Unable to relax in Baltimore, Carina is offered by her old college friend Emily Mueller the refuge of an empty bed and breakfast on the other side of the country as a respite. Carina takes this chance to escape.
On the surface, nothing seems amiss in Greentree. After all, there are small but wealthy towns across the US. Why should Greentree be any different? Still, something rubs Carina the wrong way. Even when she starts hearing noises at night, she writes them off as the typical moan and groan of an old house or her own paranoia about Steve. But a wonky refrigerator can’t explain the heavy footsteps outside her bedroom, or the strange field of scarecrows holding scythes just beyond the window.
Carina’s hypervigilance is rightly attributed to Steve’s abuse. When we meet Steve in the first point-of-view shift of many throughout the novella, he and his friends incite a tense scene at a local Baltimore bar, which escalates into threats against a female bartender. “You see,” he tells her, “I’ve had to deal with women all my life. Hot women, ugly women, old women, young women—if there’s a woman out there, God knows I’ve dealt with her” (p. 7). He asserts he’s dealt with all “types” and, before being kicked out of the bar, shows the bartender a photo that he keeps on his phone of a battered Carina. He thinks of himself as “Odysseus, Hercules, Ulysses […] the judge and the jury, and yes, sometimes the executioner too” (p. 19). To use his own phrase, Steve’s “type” of man is the violently-egotistical-but-insecure kind familiar to any horror reader. When he pursues Carina across the country in the novella’s early chapters, we may fear for her safety, but we suspect that his violence is just a cog in the machine that lurks in Greentree.
Emily and her husband Wilbur, conversely, are the picture-perfect vision of a small-town couple, themselves rather new to Greentree as well, and hoping to make a good impression. Emily takes Carina under her wing, providing introductions, inviting her to parties, and accepting her decision to get a job at the town’s video store, the Stardust—despite her insistence that Carina doesn’t need to prove her worth. Carina’s anxiety about being a “charity case” is rooted in this years-long disparity between the friends. Emily is, to Carina, unbelievable. She’s a teacher but not at all the Ichabod Crane in his austere schoolroom that Carina imagines. Rather, she’s wealthy, put-together, and has a (seemingly) enviable home life. The only piece of the Mueller family that doesn’t quite adhere is Hazel, their goth teenage daughter with a blunt attitude towards both Carina and Greentree.
Indeed, although Greentree is small and remote, everyone in town seems to be affluent, improbably so: “I think everyone I’ve met in town,” thinks Carina, “has either been well off or the children of those who are well-off” (p. 42). Later, after the novella’s inciting death, she hits the books to learn more about what the locals call the Autumn Autopsies, a death that comes for one citizen every season. Carina learns that Greentree was founded by a millionaire, Cameron Green, two centuries ago. Hazel explains that the settlers’ first winter in Greentree exposed him as “a big fraud.” As deaths piled up—natural and otherwise—the settlers had to use up their wealth to survive. Green “brought all these people over who were supposed to build houses and grow food, but they all sort of sucked at it. These were rich people after all—so, like, they’d be like Cameron, who said he was a farmer when he actually sold farm equipment” (p. 105). Strangest of all, Carina discovers, only women are victims of the Autumn Autopsies.
This is Winter’s second intervention in an otherwise straightforward horror story: collapsing individuated abuse with societal abuse. A Spectre is Haunting Greentree specifically understands misogyny as the natural extension of labor exploitation. Men’s small actions, while horrific, extrapolate into systematic oppression. That is, while Winter never trivializes Steve’s abuse of Carina, what haunts Greentree goes beyond the actions of any one man.
To dive too deep into the systems that govern Greentree here would do a disservice to the pleasure of allowing Winter’s novella to unspool naturally. But there is one moment that perhaps gives some further insight into A Spectre is Haunting Greentree’s preoccupations. On her first day working at the Stardust, Carina wanders into the back. If you’re old enough to remember the curtains at the back of a video rental store, you’ll know to expect pornography. Carina recalls Steve’s porn, “unmoved by it, by the hulking men and screaming women—it seemed something uncanny and unnatural, not the product of humans but humanoids” (p. 49). In the Stardust’s back room, however, there is a mural of a scarecrow “surrounded by stalks of yellow corn and a blood red sky” (p. 49)—not the usual style of the adults-only section. And instead of lurid covers, she finds only unmarked jewel cases. Greentree citizens glide in and out of this back room, renting these mysterious videos. This sinister moment highlights the sexual and gendered violence that haunts A Spectre is Haunting Greentree—and brings to life the ways in which we not just accept abuse but commodify it, too.
Winter—especially in tandem with Tenebrous Press, which specializes in weird horror—is a promising horror author. A Spectre is Haunting Greentree has shades of Leigh Whannell’s 2020 reimagining of The Invisible Man in its gender politics and of John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester (2017), and even Devil House (2022), in its characterization of small-town Americana. The novella’s dominant Marxist framework, however, is timely (Hazel compares Cameron Green to Elon Musk) but heavy-handed, leaving little to chew on when all is said and done. Not all of the pieces quite cohere. The prose is sometimes clumsy. Yet, Winter is willing to attack big ideas head-on—and doesn’t shy from truly horrific moments.
[Editor's Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a gift from Alexandra Pierce during our annual Kickstarter.]