The house was supposed to be a sanctuary. It became a snare.

Rhiannon Grist’s debut novel Home Sick arrives from Solaris in 2026 as one of the most quietly devastating entries in contemporary psychological folk horror. Following Tamsin, a woman who flees Edinburgh after a violent incident at work and finds herself sharing a semi-detached house with an unnerving stranger in the Scottish countryside, Home Sick combines domestic dread and folkloric menace.

If you came to this book looking for jump scares, look elsewhere. If you came because something in the premise got under your skin before you’d even opened the cover, Grist has written exactly the book you’re hoping for.

Home Sick by Rhiannon Grist Review: Folk Horror That Gets Under Your Skin

You can change your address, but you can’t outrun your own shadow. Read Home Sick before you even think about packing your bags.

Tamsin buys a cottage in the Scottish countryside and ends up with a neighbour instead.

That architectural deception, the solitary retreat that turns out to be a semi-detached in the middle of nowhere, is the kind of specific, what appears to be everyday horror that Rhiannon Grist has built her debut novel around. Home Sick (Solaris, 2026) is a book that understands exactly where modern dread lives: not in crypts or forests, but in thin walls, shared hallways, and the particular misery of being watched through glass you thought was private.

Grist has constructed something that functions as much as a psychological portrait as a horror novel, and the two modes feed each other with real intelligence.

Tamsin arrives in the Scottish countryside nursing what the novel’s opening line calls a failure of symmetry. After a violent incident at work she cannot fully process, she has fled Edinburgh for what she imagines will be a clean start, a cottage she can remake herself inside. What she finds instead is a semi-detached house, shared with a neighbour she never quite sees full-on, a woman whose smile is described as permanent and unnerving, who shifts between dowdy and vivacious in ways that seem designed to wrong-foot Tamsin specifically.

The horror Grist builds here is almost entirely atmospheric in the book’s first half. Disturbances in the house. A creak on the wrong side of the wall. Local residents have old stories about the property. Nothing that would hold up in court, nothing with a face you could point at. This is where Grist is most precise as a writer: she understands that effective dread is cumulative, that the unsettling detail sticks longer when it arrives without fanfare.

Pacing is everything in a book like this, and Grist has a steady hand on it. The tension coils rather than spikes. You find yourself reading the mundane scenes, Tamsin’s attempts at friendship with the locals, her small rituals of settling in, with the low-grade anxiety of someone who has just heard an unfamiliar sound in a quiet house. By the time the paranoia spirals hard, Grist has so thoroughly embedded you in Tamsin’s perspective that the reader’s own grip on what is real and what is projected becomes genuinely uncertain.

That is the nerve the book presses hardest. And it does so with the lightness of touch that only comes from real craft.

Grist writes with the precision of someone who learned the form in the short-fiction trenches. Her sentences are tight but not cold. She layers information rather than withholding it, a meaningful distinction: there is a difference between a writer who keeps secrets from you and a writer who gives you everything you need and trusts you to be disturbed by it. Grist belongs to the second school.

The prose has the texture of a weather report given by someone having a quiet breakdown. Tamsin’s narration is clear on the surface and unstable underneath, and Grist calibrates this without ever tipping into the unreliable-narrator cliché of wild inconsistency. The instability is subtle: a sentence that parses perfectly until you read it again. A description of a social interaction that is slightly too detailed, too anxious, too aware of small signals. The register suggests a person who has been walking on ice for so long that normal ground still feels treacherous.

The POV choice is crucial here. First person, close in, no relief. You cannot step back from Tamsin to get a perspective on her, because there is no external vantage point. This is not a comfortable read; it is a deliberately claustrophobic one, the semi-detached house that contains the plot mirroring the tight psychic space Grist keeps you in throughout.

Chapter construction is economical. Each section ends before it overstays its welcome, and Grist uses the side characters, the locals with their guarded familiarity and their oblique stories about the house, to add texture without ever releasing the pressure on Tamsin at the book’s centre. They are sharply drawn in a few lines, present enough to be felt, not so developed that they pull the focus from where it needs to be.

Home Sick is a book about what happens to a woman’s anger when she has nowhere to put it.

The violent incident at work that opens the story is not described in full detail at the start, and Grist is shrewd to leave it in peripheral vision rather than staging it. What matters is not the incident itself but what it has done to Tamsin’s relationship with her own emotional life.

She has tried to flee a version of herself she cannot outrun. The fresh start she seeks is not just geographical; it is an attempt at self-erasure, at becoming a new person, perhaps someone who does not contain the rage that got her into trouble. What the novel does with tremendous intelligence is refuse that option. The house has history. The neighbour is a mirror. The village has its own old stories. Self-destruction, it turns out, cannot simply be relocated.

This connects to something wider in the book’s cultural preoccupations. The unheimlich, that Freudian uncanny in which the homely becomes threatening, is not just a borrowed Gothic device here; it is the thematic engine. Tamsin’s attempt to make a home out of a place that was never intended to be hers runs parallel to her attempt to make a self out of who she is rather than who she wishes she were. Both projects go wrong in similar ways. What was supposed to be sanctuary becomes a snare because the thing threatening her is not primarily outside the wall. And she ends up running up a mountain in her own mind

The folklore embedded in the novel’s bloodstream adds another layer. Scottish folk tradition has its own rich vocabulary for the uncanny, for places that are and aren’t quite what they appear, for figures that shift between states without warning. Grist draws on this tradition not as decoration but as structural logic, giving the neighbour’s strangeness a resonance that feels rooted in something older and harder to name than mere psychological disturbance. The result is that the horror operates on multiple registers simultaneously, working as paranoid psychological realism and as something that might, just might, not be explainable by Tamsin’s fractured mental state alone.

Female rage as subject matter has found considerable traction in contemporary horror, and Grist handles it with more precision than the label usually implies. Tamsin’s anger is not righteous or empowering in the conventional sense. It is messy, self-directed, frequently turned back on the person who most deserves relief from it. That complexity is what gives the book its emotional weight. You root for Tamsin not because she is a heroine but because she is recognisably trapped in a particular kind of interior architecture that most people will know from somewhere.

The Queen of the High Fields, Grist’s British Fantasy Award-winning novella published by Luna Press in 2022, made her reputation in the UK weird fiction community, and deservedly so. That book follows Carys Price and Angharad ‘Hazard’ Evans, two misfits from a disenfranchised Welsh seaside town who spend their youth trying to reach the High Fields, a mythical island off the Welsh coast, before a reunion ten years later forces a reckoning. At its core, it is about domineering friendships, Welsh mythology, the violence that can exist inside female intimacy, and the search for a cultural heritage that feels genuinely one’s own.

The continuities with Home Sick are immediately legible. Angry young women who do not fit, folklore as structural architecture rather than set dressing, the particular claustrophobia of landscapes that feel charged with older meanings, the wreckage of attempts to be somewhere or someone new. Where The Queen of the High Fields operated within the epic compressed into the novella form, its mythological scope giving it a breadth that sometimes pushed against the page count, Home Sick works the domestic register. The scale has contracted, and the pressure has increased accordingly.

What the longer form has given Grist is space to breathe around her central character. Tamsin has time to fail at small things, to embarrass herself, to attempt kindness and miscalculate, to build and dismantle theories. This matters enormously. The Queen of the High Fields was a brilliant sprint; Home Sick is a controlled descent. The craft has not just translated across forms, it has deepened. Where the novella occasionally had to trust mythology to do character work, the novel can earn everything it asks of the reader through accumulation.

Grist’s contribution to Found 2, the found footage horror anthology edited by Andrew Cull and Gabino Iglesias, sits at a slight angle to her main body of work but reveals something important about her range. Found footage as a form is preoccupied with evidence and its unreliability, with documents that cannot quite capture what they record. That interest in the gap between record and reality translates directly into the way Tamsin’s narration functions. Grist has been thinking about the limits of testimony for a while.

Home Sick sits at the crossroads of domestic horror and folk horror, two of the most energetically evolving corners of the genre right now. The publisher’s comparison to We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer is instructive, as both novels are preoccupied with the home as a psychic battlefield, with what houses contain and reflect about the people inside them. But where Kliewer works with dread that builds from an external intrusion, the sinister family on the doorstep, Grist’s threat is more ambiguous in its origin and more deeply interior. The wall between Tamsin and her neighbour is thinner than either of them might want, and it is never entirely clear whether what bleeds through is supernatural or self-generated.

The folk gothic tradition Grist draws from has strong UK precedents in writers like Andrew Michael Hurley, whose debut The Loney established a template for fiction in which landscape and folk belief create pressure that feels both ancient and psychologically precise. Grist’s Scotland is not as geographically dominant as Hurley’s Lancashire coast, but the village, its residents, its old stories, functions in a similar way: as a place that has its own history with the strange, and will absorb Tamsin’s unravelling into that history without much ceremony.

What genuinely separates Home Sick from its neighbours in the folk-horror-meets-psychological-horror space is that double function: the way the folklore is not an explanation for Tamsin’s experience but a context that surrounds it without resolving it. The book’s horror is not clarified by its folkloric framework. It is deepened by it. That ambiguity is the hardest thing to sustain in this genre, the refusal to let either the psychological or the supernatural fully consume the other, and Grist sustains it with a cool head and a steady nerve that suggest a writer who knows exactly what she is doing, even when Tamsin very much does not.

Some debut novels announce a writer. Home Sick announces an arrival.

Home Sick by Rhiannon Grist

“The symmetry should have tipped me off.”

After a violent incident at work, Tamsin goes looking for a fresh start in a remote cottage far away from her old life. Here she could make real friends, find a job she loves, become a whole new person, even.

But the solitary cottage is actually a semi-detached, with only a thin wall separating her from a total stranger. Her neighbour is an enigma. Dowdy one moment, vivacious the next, but always wearing an unnerving smile. Tamsin can’t shake the feeling that there’s something wrong with her, especially when she starts experiencing disturbances in her own home.

As the locals share strange stories about her house, and her barely contained paranoia spirals out of control, Tamsin begins to suspect that the past she was so desperate to escape might never let her go.