Motswana writer Tlotlo Tsamaase once again innovates, blending folkloric horror and cyberspace, in her second novel, House of Margins. While any reader can find something to enjoy from such a uniquely well crafted story, I believe that fellow writers especially will discover something worthwhile in its pages, as it challenges its audience to think about publishing as an industry and the ethics of telling other people’s stories.
House of Margins is a story about a missing Motswana fiction writer whose sudden disappearance is linked to her stay at a writing residency in Cape Town, South Africa. The victim, Anaya Sebeya, is an emerging writer who desperately needs to win the fellowship award to justify her decision to be a writer despite the challenges of the industry. The story toggles back and forth between the present day, through the perspective of Anaya’s sister Ranewa as she tries to uncover the mystery, and the past from Anaya’s perspective.
But it’s not just Anaya’s story we’re hearing. Her story is being retold in the format of a narrative podcast by another character who does not have the purest intentions. This large degree of separation from Anaya’s true “voice” leaves us questioning everything we hear. Meanwhile, Ranewa’s chapters in the present day have her following this unreliable narration, guided by a haunted cell phone that feeds her clues on what caused her sister to disappear. To achieve these multimodal dimensions of storytelling, House of Margins fluidly takes on different tenses, styles, and voices. The past and present blend together as Ranewa discovers more about what happened to her sister and how it is all tied to the cursed house that hosted the writing residency.
House of Margins also experiments with form, as there are several interludes in between chapters that give glimpses of the Internet buzz around Anaya’s case, immersing us with text messages, news articles, and social media posts that give new looks into the players of this mystery.
Throughout the novel, the accurate presentation of these different modes of storytelling makes reading an incredibly immersive experience, as if this is a real breaking news story that you as the reader are working to solve. The comment sections are toxic, the journalists are biased, and the social media posts are more revealing than the character’s internal monologues. Each new interlude introduces new glimmers of knowledge that breathe life into the plot with even just the smallest details.
The structure of House of Margins is not only inspired by true crime journalism, however, but also takes a critical look at how the people documented in true crime are exploited by those who are making a profit off of telling their stories. Tsamaase displays a mature understanding of metanarrative writing as she embodies the very medium being critiqued, demonstrating how real human tragedies can be presented as mere segments of entertainment. The line between raising awareness and making money is blurred to a comedic yet thought-provoking effect.
The further the mystery unravels, the more we learn that Anaya was suffering a curse tied to the house of the writing residency. The house, known as “Huis,” is a character in itself, written as a powerful and intimidating force of evil. The source of Huis’s evil stems from the long history of white colonialism and anti-Black violence that takes place throughout South Africa and Botswana. While the story does not flinch from or censor itself about the true atrocities committed against the people of these countries, House of Margins ultimately imparts a story about hope and renewal by meeting hardship with faith and love.
As a writer myself, an aspect of this story I particularly appreciated was the metacommentary about the literary world. Anaya is an emerging writer, not quite established, and has a lot of work to put in to get recognized—especially compared to her writing fellows who are more naturally gifted at promoting themselves on social media. Anaya also receives grief from Michele, the only white South African in the writing residency, who pities herself for being a “minority” in a publishing industry that is supposedly favoring for Black voices. As if that’s not enough to deal with, Anaya also struggles with backlash from her mentors, who want to pigeonhole her writing as something that reflects industry standards. Anaya’s creative writing is too experimental, incorporates too much of her own native language, and is unafraid of making audiences uncomfortable with its graphic descriptions of anti-Black violence—which ensures she receives certain kinds of critique from her peers and mentors.
Anaya is fed platitudes that her writing is brilliant, yet receives pushback for writing what she truly feels, and is instead coached to become more commercial and palatable. The sentiment of “This writing is great, but …” that Anaya often hears will no doubt ring familiar to other writers who write about their trauma or experiment with form. These scenes create great dark humor and serve as a reminder of how the publishing industry does not always desire great and unique writing, especially when it makes white and Western readers uncomfortable. It calls into question the platitudes about people wanting to read authentic stories and authentic voices, given that, at the same time, they do not actually want to hear about the suffering of other people.
If there was any element of this book that gave me pause, it was the supporting character Ogone, one of the fellows in the writing residency who befriends Anaya. During a scene where the two women share an intimate conversation about faith, Ogone reveals that she used to be a lesbian until she converted to Christianity. In the present day after Anaya’s disappearance, Ogone is engaged to a man and remains that way through the remainder of the book. This example of successful queer-to-straight conversion left a bad taste in my mouth, and I wished that such an upsetting topic was challenged by the narrative instead of tolerated. There was an opportunity to dig into homophobia in South Africa, since, early on in the book, Anaya confides to the audience that she herself is bisexual. I can understand how, in a story that already focuses on racism and violence against women, there might not be room to properly examine anti-queerness. Still, I wished for a longer conversation about homophobia that was critical about Ogone’s conversion, especially with a queer protagonist.
Nonetheless, through its intersection of racism, satirical true crime storytelling, and the publishing world, House of Margins emerges as an epic novel that hits many high notes with its evolutions of form and timely talking points. I quite literally have never read a book like this one which deftly shifts genres and formats, yet weaves it all together in a cohesive narrative and transcendent horror-mystery. I cannot recommend this book enough for anyone who is hungry for new ways of telling horror stories with a twist of SF and magical realism.