Houses were never left empty in this city,” observes Áine, the protagonist of Róisín Lanigan’s debut novel I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There. Every potential London rental property, however dispiriting, seems to be snatched up in a panic moments after it is advertised. Usually, there is barely a day or so of grace period between the old tenants setting off in their rented vans, and the new ones arriving in theirs.
So why, then, is the flat that Áine is viewing with her boyfriend Elliot eerily free from any sign of life? Why is it still on the market a fortnight after the listing appeared online? Why is the rent just about affordable, in this “boujee” enclave of the capital, where stylish parents dress their equally stylish babies up like “tiny Copenhagen-based fashion influencers”? There is something about the space that unnerves Áine; a sense of “wrongness persisted despite the ticked boxes and the beautiful bay windows”, Lanigan writes.
Inevitably, though, the couple hand over the deposit and e-sign the contract. Yes, those bay windows are only single glazed but, as Elliot puts it, “we’re used to damp at this point, surely”. His words seem to sum up the bleak pragmatism of the serial renter, whose grim logic tends to go something along the lines of: we could do better, but we could certainly do worse.
So many of us have lived out our own renting horror stories, experiences that are often deeply painful at the time, but eventually become a part of our personal mythologies, tales that we can later recount, often with a darkly funny spin, from a safe distance. The landlord with a habit of “just popping in” unannounced, then proceeding to itemise every possible way you’re ruining their glorious home. The upstairs neighbours who seem to rearrange their furniture every weeknight at approximately midnight, in bursts of insomniac feng shui. The rats that re-emerge from the pipes on a quarterly basis. The withheld deposits and the Kafka-esque email threads arguing with letting agents.
As homeownership becomes an increasingly difficult, even fanciful prospect for younger millennials and Generation Z, the amount of time – and money – that we will spend renting seems to stretch out exponentially in front of us. Last year, the amount of rent paid annually by under 45s increased by £3.5bn, reaching a record total of £56.2bn.
Against this backdrop, the various indignities and injustices that make up life as a tenant have provided rich material for some of the most memorable debut novels of the past few years. Oisín McKenna’s Evenings and Weekends, released in 2024, follows a cluster of friends in their early thirties. Some of them are on the verge of being finally priced out of London after years of renting, while others see those would-be abandoners as somehow giving up – on their youth, on their friendships, on a hard-to-define sense of possibility that life in the capital has always promised.
Jo Hamya’s 2021 book Three Rooms was a brilliant evocation of what it’s like to have your mental health slowly ground down by a house share situation, while another 2024 release, The Lodgers by Holly Pester, unpicks the disorientating experience of subletting, carving out your own life while surrounded by other people’s things.
Precarity is the prevailing mood in all of these stories. “We’re influenced by what we experience, and even in terms of where we sit down to write, housing and renting have inevitably become a major concern,” Lanigan recently told The i. “Fiction being written in s***, damp flats that suck up all your money is never going to be bucolic.” What feels particularly striking about her debut, though, is the way that she leans into, well, the outright horror of it all.
In I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There, Áine starts to experience her own nightmare rental as a Gothic novel, albeit one littered with the trappings of millennial life. At home, she begins to feel as if she’s being watched, observed by an audience that is “threatening. Almost malevolent.” Black mould starts to seep out from behind the basement door and splatter the walls of their living space. Wails emerge from the upstairs flat. Post doesn’t arrive for weeks, then turns up all at once, on a Sunday. Fruit turns rotten and mushy within hours of being unpacked from the supermarket. Áine’s recurrent cough comes back with a vengeance.
In isolation, any one of these happenings might feel like a banal annoyance. But as they slowly accumulate, they start to leave Áine oppressed, disorientated and increasingly at odds with Elliot. Like so many young couples, they’ve leapt into cohabitation a little earlier than they might’ve liked in order to save money and avoid re-entering the fray of Spare Room; it’s a decision catalysed by flatmates moving on and leases coming to an end.
Moving in together only seems to have thrown the cracks and uncertainties in their relationship into stark relief. It doesn’t help that Elliot is resolutely rational, while Áine has more of an affinity with supernatural stories, having grown up hearing family tales about banshees and the like. Even Laura, her best friend and former flatmate, takes Elliot’s side when it comes to the potential haunting. “I don’t think you can get a Foxton’s discount for demonic possession,” she says, dripping in snark. Lanigan has a knack for punctuating the lurking sense of dread with bursts of dark humour, which prevent Áine’s Gothic nightmare from straying over into melodrama. The narration, too, is often enjoyably deadpan, which chimes perfectly with the futility of the renting cycle, such as when Áine ponders how she had “never moved into a place that was clean, never left a place without cleaning it, and never received a deposit back without an extortionate cleaning fee deduction”.
What Lanigan has lighted upon is that there is something inherently ghostly about the whole rental process. Every new home that we move into, once the last one has become unaffordable, is occupied by the spectres of tenants past, each with their own hidden history. Their old mail clutters up the letterbox, their old cutlery still knocking around in the drawers. They’re even, in a way, lurking around in the air or the carpet: Áine becomes preoccupied with “how dust was made of other people’s skin, and it felt weird not knowing whose skin she was coughing up now”.
Model tenants, those perfect renters you pretend to be when meeting with an agent for the first time, the ones who are clean and social but don’t like to party, are expected to exist like ghosts, too – or at least to be somehow incorporeal, leaving a property unmarked, as if it has never been lived in by actual humans carrying out actual lives. So your bedroom is splattered with abstract flourishes of black mould? You’re probably just breathing too much, in the house you pay to live in. Lanigan’s characters receive a barrage of emails reminding them of everything they’re doing wrong in their cursed property, as if cooking with a pan lid on can stop the supernatural spread of the damp.
Which brings us to “normal wear and tear” – a notoriously subjective term for most landlords. No wonder Áine cringes every time that Elliot bashes his work rucksack into the exact same spot on the wall, leaving a mark that, she fears, will eventually be factored into a hefty deduction from their deposit. She surreptitiously searches online for tips on how best to remove stains from magnolia paint. Of course their walls are magnolia – it’s the universal shade of the soulless, liminal rental home. The very blankness and beigeness is a reminder of your lack of stake in this place, of your impermanence.
That sense of impermanence, of never feeling at ease in the place that’s ostensibly your safe haven, slowly causes Áine to fall apart. Her disintegration might be heightened, but it’s horribly recognisable all the same. I Want To Go Home… might be a ghost story, yet it is also a visceral, sometimes unbearably realistic exploration of how renting can take a truly frightening psychological toll – scarier even than looking up property prices on Rightmove.
I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There by Róisín Lanigan is published by Fig Tree, £16.99
