Despite the fact that they have been estranged for several years, when 30-something Vera Crowder’s mother, Daphne, asks her to come home because she is dying, Vera packs up her less-than-stellar life and heads home to the house that was both heaven and hell.

Her father, Francis Crowder, had built the house long before she was born, back when his marriage to Vera’s mother was new. Back before everything else happened, before everyone knew his name. He’d built it with his two strong hands, built it right in the middle of his square patch of green land, built two stories above the ground and dug one below.

It is really Vera’s complicated feelings for her father that drive her back home, “that, and the impossible reality of her mother’s voice on the phone, rippling with sickness.”

Home is now a bit of a circus. In order to make ends meet, Daphne has been renting out the garden shed to artists, writers, and lookie-loos hoping to be inspired by Francis Crowder’s madness. The latest inhabitant is James Duvall, an artist who feels he has a special right to be there because his father had written the definitive book about Francis’s crimes. Vera hates him on sight.

As a child, Vera was convinced that something nefarious was happening in Crowder house, particular in the basement where she was often awoken by “wet slapping noises” coming from down there. Francis kept the basement locked and Vera was given strict instructions to never go down there.

Generally speaking, her relationship with her father is easier than her relationship with her mother.

He’s a big wall of clean soap with curly brown hair that’s thinning in back, a crooked smile with a chipped tooth in front, big ropy muscles in his arms from cutting lumber all day. He’ll scoop Vera up close into a hug after he’s checked the bed and the closet and the curtains and the corners. He’ll tell her that no monsters are there. He’ll check twice.

Just Like Home is a novel about family as much as it’s about anything. And I was wholly invested in watching the family dynamics play out; Vera’s growing understanding (but strangely not horror) of what her father was up to, the erosion of her relationship with her mother. It also examines the weird cult of leeches who feed off the misfortune of others. Vera isn’t particularly likeable, although she is somehow sympathetic.

Then there’s that ending. I was all in until that. Still, worth a read.