Seven Stories Press

Unsettling and racially charged, Shelter Is Necessary for Existence is equal parts psychological thriller and social satire that explores the disquieting qualities of a privileged family’s mundane cultural assumptions.

"The narrator of Brenda Iijima’s strange and thrilling novel Shelter Is Necessary for Existence is in the process of renovating a Brooklyn townhouse, her second. . . What begins as a droll satire of shallow Brooklyn yuppies turns into a literal haunted house story. . . All of this builds to a climax that’s utterly shocking; you’ll want to scour from the beginning for clues you missed. The call is coming from inside the house, etc. Which is another way of saying: Houses can be haunted by the living, too."
—Lauren Christensen, The New York Times Book Review

Sue, her husband, Luke, and their children, Caroline and Wheatley, present as a picture-perfect family living the American dream of ascendancy and affluence in their Brooklyn neighborhood. They purchase a brownstone at auction on a coveted tree-lined street with the intention of renovating it and moving in. At once avoidant and consumed by the renovation, Sue is torn between her aspirations to have what those around her seem to possess—from her therapist, Diana, to her alluring, insufferable neighbor Chantal—and her urge to escape the grip of their influences. Sue’s obsession and paranoia grow while the neighborhood becomes a hotbed of pulsating antagonisms.

It is only after moving in that Sue becomes aware of the mysterious deaths of the brownstone’s former residents, a mother and daughter whose voices echo in the silence. The house begins manifesting disturbing signs, such as wounds that bleed, just as Caroline and Wheatley exhibit their own troubling symptoms. Sue’s nightmares proliferate and a vacuous stupor overcomes the family as they struggle to settle into the rhythms of life in what should be their dream home. When information arises that threatens to devastate her family, Sue must finally confront the explosive charge of personal and social reality once laid bare.

With exacting psychological detail and a trenchant atmosphere, Shelter Is Necessary for Existence is a darkly comic and piercing social critique that examines the troubling territory of awareness, the lengths some go to avoid it, and what must be confronted for change to occur.

“A spooky social satire.”

– Chelsey Sanchez, Harper's Bazaar

“A Brooklyn family is haunted by their newly renovated brownstone in this devilishly entertaining novel from Iijima. . . Murphy’s law applies tenfold in this standout social commentary.”

– Publishers Weekly Starred Review

“A vicious satirical novel in which a privileged family goes too far in a futile effort to maintain a lifestyle they are incapable of enjoying.”

– Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews

“Part heart-pounding haunting, part cutting social critique, this psychological thriller is not one to be missed. Parasite meets The Haunting of Hill House.”

– Meryl L. Moss, BookTrib.com

“Brenda Iijima’s new novel is sick and it’s great. Here’s a portrait of America’s upper middle class, mid-climate-crisis, mid-death-drive, in a haunted house of their own making. Smug materialism, bad thinking, bad relations, jumbo mortgages, hidden handguns, grotesque neocolonialism—it’s all here. If only we could flee this American scene without losing our footing, without sliding into so much pooled blood. If only we could get to another history. But we live in this troubled place too. I was so glad to read a book this smart, this dark, this disturbing, as if expelling me toward a new world.”

– Hilary Plum, author of State Champ

“A spectacular demonstration of verbal acrobatics. Shelter is Necessary for Existence perfectly balances droll observation with quiet terror and social criticism, and the effect is one of the eeriest and funniest horror novels I've read. It had me turning pages in every spare minute right up until the shocking end.”

– Sarah Gerard, author of Carrie Carolyn Coco

“Shelter is Necessary for Existence is a viscerally unsettling fable of haute bourgeois worship at the twin altars of Amazon Prime and Remodelista.com. Like that AD "Open Door" video with Lily Allen and her pathologically creepy ex-husband, this tour of the horror-soaked American psyche and its many tasteful draperies should have 9 million+ views.”

– Lucy Ives, author of Life is Everywhere

“Iijima's second novel delights in minutiae that builds to combine a horror novel, a domestic nightmare, and a vicious critique of what constitutes values, both spiritual and superficial and everything in between, among the upper middle class of New York City. Dumbfounding, unique, relentless and wholly satisfying.”

– Paula Bomer, author of The Stalker

“Shelter is Necessary for Existence will chew you up and spit you out. With razor sharp prose and pitch-black humor, Brenda Iijima delves deep into the mundane violence of privilege and the impossibility of disconnecting oneself from history.”

– Maggie Su, author of Blob

“The idea of unexamined, unconcerned, destructively oblivious privilege is put under the harshest light possible. Iijima brings us into a haunted mind, wrecked by her own privilege, unaware of the terrors surrounding and emanating from her life, and trapped in a wealth-dimmed nowhere at all.”

– Bryan O'Neill, Chicago Review of Books

“Equal parts satire and psychological thriller, this ghost story will stay with you long past its last page.”

– New York Times Editor’s Pick

Shelter is Necessary for Existence

A Novel

by Brenda Iijima

Collected in

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