Book Review: I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There by Róisín Lanigan

As you may be aware, I enjoy reading. (Quite the understatement). I like a bit of everything, but as genres go, I will always come back to horror. There is something about the horror genre that just lights up for me. It has a depth that only it’s fans can truly appreciate. You can have horror/sci-fi, horror/lit-fic, horror/romance. You can have body horror, supernatural horror, gory horror. It’s such a vast genre, and I love exploring it.

I went to an event at Blackwell’s in Manchester – I often go to their events, they run awesome author events that cover a wide range of genres, as well as non-fiction too. They often have 2 authors at an event and the conversations that come up from these are so organic and amazing. The event relevant to this was on of those events. It was titled: Home is where the haunt is.

At ‘Home is where the haunt is’, two authors were invited to talk about their books. Tobi Coventry talked about his book He’s The Devil and Róisín Lanigan talked about her book I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There. Both books had a similar theme – they both play with the idea of being haunted, from a modern (and millennial) standpoint of the (really rather grim) rental market.

Tobi Coventry and Róisín Lanigan in conversation at Blackwell’s Manchester.

I loved the event, both authors were so lovely, and I decided that when I got paid, I would try and find additional signed copies in store.

I’ve also previously mentioned that I am undertaking the #ReadingWithMuffy challenge for 2026. The April prompt is to read a book whose title is a full sentence. Well, I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There fit this challenge perfectly!

As I was reading this, at first blush I thought it was a straightforward haunted house horror story. But the more I think about it and reflect on it, it is so much more. I don’t think this is a classic horror, so would recommend it to readers who usually avoid horror. If I had to try and ‘label’ it, I would say it’s horror adjacent – using a lot of the horror style without the impact of horror. It’s literary fiction I think… it is also romance adjacent, but unlike romance books (and more like horror/romance) it depicts a much more realistic relationship, with ups and downs.

Okay, there will be spoilers below, so proceed with caution!

Let’s start with the very millennial experience of renting. I now (humble brag) own my own home, and this honestly terrified me. I’ve been a serial renter and loved that issues weren’t my problem financially, I could relocate if I wanted to (I’ve lived in Bedfordshire, Cardiff, Surrey and now live between Liverpool and Manchester). Owning a property and being tied down scared me, but I am free of the horrors of constant issues with deposits, nightmare landlords, absent landlords, I had one letting agency steal my deposit (that is a wild story for another time), deep cleaning at the end of a tenancy then moving into properties with mould, rats, mice, fleas, bedbugs, leaks, heating problems… I am now in a new build and very spoilt for my extreme lack of issues. This book though, brought all of those things screaming back. Millennial renting PTSD is very real it turns out.

“She thought about how she had never moved into a place that was clean, never left a place without cleaning it, and had never received a deposit back without an extortionate cleaning fee deduction.”

That passage really resonated with me. Moving days were always so stressful, moving from one rental property to another. You usually had a day, sometimes up to 5 if I didn’t do the maths right, where your tenancies overlapped. So everything had to be moved in a day, and then also the deep cleaning. Trying to leave it in as good a condition as possible in a desperate attempt to get your deposit back, whilst moving into a place that looks like it’s never been cleaned. Rental PTSD.

There’s also that weird period where you haven’t got the internet connected yet in the new place. So, you’re kind of forced into unpacking and arranging things, and connecting your devices to your phone, but you don’t want to use up all your data, so you look for the few DVDs you still have. I used to watch Independence Day on my first night in a new place. It was my little ritual. I somehow always knew where I packed that DVD!

“She had forgotten the weirdness of moving into an empty building and calling it home, how when the dust settled you were left there with none of your stuff out facing you to confirm your aesthetic choices and the fact that you were alive”.

Lanigan does an excellent job at conveying the fatigue of trying to find a place too. She calls it “a Tinderfication of housing” and I really enjoyed that. Browsing RightMove and other similar sites/apps does feel like dating apps. The properties with no pictures (red flag), the properties you arrange a viewing for and the pictures are clearly old (red flag), the properties which have 2 or 3 photos and the other 7 are all local amenities (red flag). But the desperation ultimately wins out – those red flags are overlooked, because there’s always something worse out there. There’s also the pressure applied by the letting agents: “I’ve got 5 more viewings on this tomorrow”, “We’ve already got a few people thinking about this one, so you’ll want to make a decision quicker than them to be in with a chance”, “The couple who came to view it before you made an offer, but if you can go over the amount on our website, you’ll definitely get it over them.” Lanigan captures all of this and more. It’s so well done.

Let’s move on to the relationship. Elliott and Áine are pretty normal? It’s all from Áine’s perspective, so we don’t know what’s really going on with Elliott, but I really vibed hard with Áine.

Elliott is one of those boyfriends who seems lovely on the surface, but there were a few moments that gave me the ick. I highlighted some of the passages, so let me know if my ick is a bit too trigger happy:

“Once Elliott told her on the train that she ‘squandered the asset of silence’ and she fell instantly quiet and he looked pleased… Later she found the same line in a Shirley Hazzard book he’d lent her, but she didn’t point it out, in case he was embarrassed about stealing it.”

“She worried now that she was making his life miserable through the spectacle of her own misery, over stupid, pointless things: The house is haunted, I don’t have any money, I don’t like getting the bus, it’s cold out there, I don’t have any friends in the office any more, I’m lonely. The house is haunted.”

“Elliott said maybe she was anaemic, and that maybe the experience was a lesson for them both.”

In typing them out, I think I’m pretty justified with my icks!

Though Elliott isn’t all bad by any stretch. It was something that Lanigan mentioned at the event: that Elliott is not a very good boyfriend, but he’s not evil. She said that would’ve been totally unrealistic, because if you’re with someone who is cartoonishly evil, you’re not going to stay with them, move in with them etc. She said she wrote it so he had good qualities, but she intended the bad to be equal to them – she wanted a relationship where things aren’t great, but good enough to warrant sticking with it.

I think this is just like the housing market, is it better to stay in this fine/okay relationship, than to leave and try and find someone else, knowing the market isn’t great? It’s an interesting comparative to the novel. Lanigan used the phrase “the horror of the Monday” – that idea that the place you’re in or the person you’re with is not perfect, but they’re also not terrible – and I really liked this!

Something else around the characters in this book, that is, I think, more normal in horror books, is how flawed and broken the characters are. Lanigan talked about this at the event I went to. She said that she was reading contemporary books that are aimed at women like her and they were very in love, and everything was fine. Everyone knew how to communicate their feelings, and everybody was having great sex – and she just didn’t think they were real. She said she was angry and her characters came from that.

Finally, let’s talk about the “haunting”. I’ve chosen to leave this until last because it needs the other topics to understand.

There are several references through the book where it talks about Áine not taking her medication regularly. We never find out what the medication is for, and I like that ambiguity. Depending on what the medication is for, changes the outcome of the inconsistency of taking it. It’s well documented by people with anxiety and depression, and bipolar, that if they stop taking their meds because they feel fine, the symptoms come back pretty quickly. But inconsistency makes it all a bit harder to find the lines of reality and mental illness for Áine.

Is this scary male character that she keeps seeing really Elliott every time? Or is he a hallucination? Or is he a ghost/spirit/entity inside the house? Or is he a result of the mould mixing with her asthma and her inconsistent use of her medication for her other health issues? Or is he a combination of her unhappiness, manifesting into a visual experience, due to her spiritual beliefs?

The mould is clearly an issue, and it isn’t imagined – other characters see it (I was wondering if it was something only Áine could see but that was debunked in several places). Basements are always issues; they’re not common in the UK, but whenever I’ve come across them, or friends have, they are sources of damp, cold and pests – never anything good (despite the letting agents telling you it doubles the square footage and is great for storage… liars).

There are so many things beyond the mould that a believer could attribute to ghosts: cold areas, the feeling of being watched, of being unwelcome. But the reality is, old houses have heating issues, uneasiness can be caused by personal circumstances. The home just becomes a breeding ground for it, as it’s where you spend most of your time, more so for Áine because she works from home.

I think this “haunting” is not only a metaphor for the relationship between Eliott and Áine (it reveals some key things they disagree about), but it’s also a metaphor for depression. Áine isn’t certain about her relationship or her job at the start of the book. She’s sad she’s leaving her flatmate who she has lived with since university, and she’s moving in with a boyfriend for the first time. These are huge life milestones, and she’s not sure about them.

Her doubt doesn’t go away. Her former flatmate has bought a houseboat and has also moved in with her boyfriend. They get engaged during the book. Her friend’s life is on the positive trajectory, meanwhile, she’s in a similar situation but it’s a downward spiral. They say comparison is the thief of joy, but there was no joy in Áine’s life to begin with – this all felt thrust upon her. And those doubts build.

Is the haunting even happening? Or is it something for Áine to focus on which becomes an escape hatch out of which she can flee her personal circumstances?

At the dinner party, her former flatmate mentions that living with Elliott has made Áine healthier – she’s eating proper meals instead of packets of crisps or snacks. This isn’t making Áine better though, and when Elliott isn’t there, she reverts back to her former eating habits. Being mentally well takes physical work too – diet and exercise are always the first things doctors talk about when depression is mentioned. But when she’s left the flat and Elliott (and her job we find out), and moves into the studio flat, she is doing these things herself, for herself. She has become the healthier version of Áine others were thinking she was before.

It’s such a nuance, and maybe it takes someone who has experienced depression in this way to see it. Having healthy choices given to you, does not pull you out of the depression hole. Because once that support has gone, you just crumple straight back into the bad habits. The change isn’t something you’ve chosen, or you’re doing, so it’s not actually helping. More needs to change to get out of the depression hole. (Does that make sense?!)

And for that reason, I think this book is horror adjacent. It uses so much of the style of horror, without really being horror, that it’s hard to categorise it as something else.

Either way, at 277 pages long, this shorter book packs one hell of a punch. I’ll be thinking about this for a while and recommending it to everyone.