Book Title: I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There
Author: Róisín Lanigan
Publisher: Penguin UK
Publishing Date: March 2025
Every generation has its own idea of what constitutes supreme horror. What frightened our parents or grandparents might look quaint now, but the nature of fear evolves with circumstance. For Generation Rent, horror doesn’t arrive in the form of ghosts in old manors; it’s the creeping dread of an email from a landlord, the mould sticking incorrigibly on the ceiling, the endless scroll through listings you can’t afford.
Property ownership has long been the gold standard of stability, a benchmark of adulthood, and yet for so many, it now exists just beyond the horizon; more myth than milestone. Across many cultures, renting still carries the faint stigma of impermanence, a sign that one has not quite ‘arrived’. But the practicalities of a transient, uncertain economy have made renting not just common, but inevitable.
There is an unspoken grief embedded in the act of renting: the quiet knowledge that nothing truly belongs to you, that the walls around you could one day reject you without warning. The rental market, once a space of choice, has morphed into a site of endurance. Tenants cling to leases the way one clings to a life raft: not because it’s ideal, but because it’s what’s left.
And despite the strangeness of the corridor, the layout of the rest of the flat was normal. Well, it was at least the weird kind of normal you grew to expect in this process, its oddities unspectacular by comparison to the horror shows they’d seen already.
Situating I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There in the world of rental afflictions
It is in this climate of dispossession that Lanigan sets I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There, a work of literary horror that feels almost documentary in its precision. The novel follows Áine and her boyfriend, Elliott, as they move into a suspiciously available rental, a place that promises stability but slowly unravels their sense of self.
What begins as a dream of independence curdles into claustrophobia. The walls of the flat seem to pulse with unease: black mould spreads, strange noises echo, and Áine’s health and sanity begin to slip. The horror here isn’t the supernatural, though it flirts with the idea of haunting; it’s the slow corrosion of safety, of trust, of the mind itself.
It was sad to look at all her things in boxes and think That is my life, but it was also scary to look at her bank balance after it all and think This is my life, there is no option to do another life another time over.
Áine’s deteriorating relationship with Elliott mirrors the decay of their surroundings. As mould blooms, so does mistrust. The house becomes a pressure cooker for everything unspoken — resentment, fatigue, the quiet terror of being unseen by the person closest to you.
A House, Not a Home
The title itself reads like a lament — I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There. It articulates the paradox of modern life: the longing for safety within spaces that refuse to hold us. Home should be the place where one’s guard falls, where the armour comes off. Home should be the one place where the performance ends, where you can exist without staging your own life. For Áine, that curtain never falls. In Lanigan’s world, home is a site of siege: you are never off duty, even within your own walls.
As Áine’s grip on reality begins to slip, deterioration spills outward; collateral damage piles up: friendships fade, conversations taper off, invitations dry up. Her social world shrinks in tandem with the mould-stained room she can barely bring herself to leave.
Her paranoia, once a flicker, becomes a steady hum. Every sound in the night is suspect, every shadow a threat. Elliott, once her point of stability, starts to recede into the fog of her doubt. Their relationship — once defined by quiet if doubtful compatibility — becomes strained by disbelief. His inability to meet her halfway, to entertain her fears, even momentarily, accelerates her descent. What Lanigan captures so precisely here is the slow-motion collapse of intimacy under the weight of unspoken dread. The flat doesn’t just haunt Áine — it isolates her, turning every relationship into a test of faith.
It wasn’t the usual feeling she got of being watched, the idea that even alone she was performing for some sort of unseen audience, and that she had to look beautiful and sane and busy at all times or the audience would be annoyed at her. It was a different kind of watching. The audience felt closer.
Áine’s haunting is one of precarious modern life — of zero security, of friendships eroded by fatigue, of partners who can’t understand the silent panic that defines your days. Lanigan’s novel understands this quiet terror intimately: the horror of existing one rent cycle away from collapse. Like many contemporary Irish writers, Lanigan possesses an instinctive gift for reframing the ordinary: for threading her narratives with sly, wry observations that feel both intimate and biting. Her humour appears in unexpected places, cutting through the dread with a distinctly Irish blend of irony and tenderness.
A Psychological Horror with a Dose of Eerie
This is, at its core, a psychological horror. Each misfortune compounds the next, and the terror lies not in what is seen but in what is felt: a tightening of the chest, a quickening of unease, the creeping sense that one’s mind is no longer a trustworthy place. Throughout the novel, we are left wondering: would Áine rather bear the scarlet letter of mental illness, or cling to the comfort of believing in ghosts? Which version of reality offers her more control, or at least, the illusion of it?
It takes a specific kind of dissociation to survive in such conditions. When life becomes untenable, detachment becomes a form of endurance. Lanigan understands this intimately: the way exhaustion can distort perception, how the body and mind conspire to protect themselves by withdrawing. The hallucinations, the imagined presences, even the physical sickness that seems to engulf Áine, all of it becomes both symptom and symbol.
But what she thought was the real reason was the flat itself. That had always been the reason, she thought. Except that now, somehow, it was getting stronger, whatever force had always lived in the flat. It was feeding off them both, turning them against each other, making him tired, making her sick. It ate money and spat out black bile and sweet, damp mould. It was getting stronger now, she thought, strong, to live inside them and grow. It made Elliott angry and remote and emasculated. And now it had stayed with them, like those people who did acid once and got stuck on a bad trip for the rest of their lives. The things that were meant to bring them closer together and rejuvenate them had become stale and poisonous and were infecting them both.
Lanigan also allows subtle moments of cultural displacement to bleed through Áine’s experience: her Irish sensibilities and beliefs brushed aside or misunderstood by those around her. There’s a quiet, simmering frustration in these moments: a reminder of how easily identity can be dismissed, and how loneliness can deepen when one’s cultural shorthand goes unrecognised.
Where Does I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There Land?
Thankfully, Lanigan works with moods and atmosphere well, rendering a rich tapestry of sub-themes, namely inequality, precarity, belonging, and decay. The mould and dampness that saturate the house operate as a perfect metaphor: something insidious, slow, and stubborn, a reminder that damage does not always announce itself loudly.
This is not a novel of twists and revelations; it is a slow burn of deterioration. Each month brings a slight dimming — of health, of faith, of energy — until the characters begin to move through life with a quiet resignation. The stillness is intentional, an artistic mirror to the inertia of their lives.
Lanigan’s novel reminds us that the ghosts that frightened us as children are not the same ones that haunt us as adults. There are no jump scares here, no narrative pyrotechnics. The horror lies in the slow recognition that this, too, is what we fear now: stagnation, illness, disconnection, the quiet attrition of ordinary life.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the Advanced Review Copy!