Dear Librarian,
Set in post-revolutionary Moscow, The Haunting of Moscow House is a gothic horror novel that follows two once aristocratic sisters as they race to uncover the secrets buried in their family’s now haunted house.
I started the novel in a way I never thought would happen to me: by chance. I was researching another story idea when I stumbled upon the Sheremetev and Golitsyn families—two of Russia’s greatest and oldest aristocratic clans—and their tragic fall during the 1917 Revolution.
This cataclysmic event not only brought a change in regime but immense tragedy and civil unrest. When the Bolsheviks seized power from the Tsar, millions of people died, and many of Russia’s longstanding aristocratic families fled the country. Despite the uncertainty of their future, the oppression and persecution that followed, some decided to stay, determined to preserve their noble and cultural heritage.
Two sisters belonging to one of these real-life families inspired the protagonists of my story, as many of their survivors ended up being women. They held up their families, found food and housing for them, educated and cared for the children and aging, and joined the workforce, some even for the American Relief Administration (ARA)—a humanitarian organization that arrived in Russia in August 1921 to help with the famine following the fallout from the Revolution.
Not only is this story inspired by real women, a real family and their real ancestral house, even their real work for the ARA, but by my favorite Russian folktales and gothic stories, particularly by the Slavic gothic genre and the Ukrainian author who founded it—Nikolai Gogol. I remember my grandfather reading these stories to me when I was a little girl growing up in Moscow. It is true, they were scary for me at the time, but they instilled in me a very deep love for and fascination with gothic literature.
It meant so much to me to set my gothic story in Moscow, which is where I am from. Many of the scenes described in the novel are directly taken from my memories and family photos of a city that remains to this day steeped in a past at once beautiful and bloody.
The Haunting of Moscow House is many things. It is about a society on the cusp of momentous change, a persecuted group in history now quite forgotten, a female-centric story of survival and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood that make this possible, an old house with hundreds of years of past and memory. But at its heart, The Haunting of Moscow House is a ghost story.
I hope it haunts you as much as it has ended up haunting me.
Yours Truly,
Olesya Salnikova Gilmore
