Carissa Orlando arrived in fiction with one of the most distinctly voiced debut novels in recent horror memory. The September House, published by Berkley in September 2023, introduced readers to Margaret, a woman who has quietly negotiated a set of household rules with the ghosts sharing her Victorian home — and refuses to leave, no matter how badly September treats her. The novel earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly, a starred review from Library Journal, and appeared on Vulture's Best Books of 2023 list, drawing comparisons to classic haunted-house fiction while standing entirely apart from it.
Before writing fiction, Orlando built a career in psychology. She holds a doctorate in clinical-community psychology and specialises in work with children and adolescents, spending her professional days working to improve access to mental health care for young people and their families. That dual life — clinician by day, horror novelist by night — isn't coincidental. She has described her psychological training as the primary lens through which she views the world, and its influence runs through every character she writes. Margaret's seemingly inexplicable decision to remain in a blood-dripping, ghost-haunted house makes complete psychological sense once the reader understands who she is; Orlando engineered that effect deliberately, drawing on more than a decade of studying how context shapes human behaviour.
Orlando studied creative writing at university, though her path to publishing was anything but direct. She drafted The September House before the pandemic, revised it during lockdown, and began querying agents in the summer of 2020. The process took roughly a year. In 2021, she signed with agents Katherine Odom-Tomchin and Sharon Bowers at Folio Literary Management, who helped place the book at Berkley later that same year. From sale to publication was nearly two more years — a timeline that surprised her friends, she has said, but one filled with revisions, copyedits, and the quiet collaborative work that turns a manuscript into a finished book.
Her writing sits at the intersection of horror, psychological suspense, and dark comedy. That last element is perhaps the most unexpected: The September House is genuinely, consistently funny, in the bone-dry manner of someone who has decided that the appropriate response to dripping walls is a good set of towels. Margaret narrates the novel's chaos with the wry pragmatism of a woman who has survived worse, and that voice — unflappable, precisely observed, and quietly devastating — is what drew wide critical enthusiasm. Reviewers noted that what begins as a slyly comic haunted-house story gradually opens into something harder and more emotionally substantial, touching on abuse, resilience, and the secrets families keep.
She also contributed to Grimdark Magazine, with work appearing in Issue 35 in July 2023, ahead of her novel's debut. As of her novel's publication, she confirmed she was working on a follow-up, though details remained under wraps. For a writer who spent years developing her craft alongside a demanding clinical career, the warmth of the reception to The September House was, by her own account, something of a whirlwind — and one she clearly intends to continue.
