Boy Girl Problems

Katherine Packert Burke’s second novel All Us Saints is structured like a chamber play. Trading in the autofictional, referential, hyper-contemporary context of her first novel, Still Life, Burke turns her attention to a Gothic haunted house soaked in blood. “Certain places are wrong,” she writes in the prologue. Her new book is not, however, a traditional horror novel: The killer, for starters, is long gone. Years after their brother Roland St. Cloud killed three young girls, his surviving family members flock to the scene of the crime. This is their annual Freudian ritual, a superstitious act of remembrance. If every year they pay homage to their “tranny” brother and his victims, perhaps darkness will be kept at bay.