by Michael Harper
September 15, 2026
Shelter Is Necessary for Existence by Brenda Iijima; Two Dollar Radio; 288 pages; $18.95.
Brenda Iijima’s second novel, Shelter is Necessary for Existence, is, on the surface, a haunted house story about an affluent family as it struggles to renovate and then inhabit a home in a quickly gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. Classic horror elements play within the pages, including blood seeping from the walls, ghosts, and a history of murder in the home. But while these horror elements haunt this world, Iijima uses the pressures of maintaining social status and privilege to slowly build tension in the book, playing with the reader’s expectations about what actually makes us afraid of the dark.
After a hurried purchase of a large brownstone, Sue, the narrator, quickly becomes subsumed by an onslaught of problems with the new home. Even though she has a highly demanding job, a husband, Luke, and two children, Wheatley and Caroline, the novel’s main focus is on the inordinate amount of time she spends dealing with contractors and negotiating details with the architect she hired to oversee the renovation, as well as the time she spends in therapy discussing the fallout of the purchase.
Sue’s obsession with the house pressurizes her already intense lifestyle, pushing directly on a schism between the liberal values that she claims to hold and her devotion to materialism in her upper-middle class life. Sue is a lawyer who consults on contracts for foreign investors buying land in the Amazon rainforest and other vulnerable areas to strip them for their natural resources. In contrast, she infuses her family life with largely symbolic social markers of liberalism, like prioritizing a free-range organic turkey at Thanksgiving. These inconsistencies in values are never addressed. Instead, they grow and multiply, becoming more and more difficult for the protagonist to keep hidden, especially under the increased pressure of the home renovation, creating an unrelenting anxiety that festers under the surface of the novel.
Under Iijima’s pen, the house becomes the ultimate symbol of this disconnect. It is in a desirable neighborhood, enormous, and provides an outward-facing representation of the family’s status; but more foundationally, as the title suggests, it is needed for survival. The fact that shelter is a basic need becomes a smokescreen behind which the family can justify their economic values and need to solidify their social status. In this way, a perverse relationship develops behind the idea of a home, transforming it from a place of shelter to a fortress that protects the family’s secrets and shame surrounding their privilege.
The home, however, begins to crack under this burden. While it may be an outward facing symbol of wealth and status, Iijima works to show the illusions upon which these characterizations were built. Firstly, there is [TJ1.1]a ceaseless demand exerted on the family as they try to fend off literal obstacles like an onslaught of mold and ballooning mortgage payment they struggle to afford. While simultaneously, their identities are under attack as ever more information about their family histories and the past of their house is revealed, making their privilege more pronounced. Luke discovers a Klan robe while helping his father move to a retirement community, and their child’s research homework assignment reveals that their street is named after a Dutch military leader who slaughtered entire villages of indigenous people. This information challenges their sense of selfhood, making them explicitly part of the racist and classist history upon which their privilege is built.
While the family attempts to keep this information smothered, ghosts and bloody wounds in the walls begin to appear, becoming an embodied representation of the internal rot that the family is hiding, “The blood no longer flowed but the wall itself was soaked with deep crimson splotches. When I see blood, I think of suffering, Ted remarked…..this wound has been displaced from a corporeal context, until we think of the house as a body.”
When the family is confronted with these horrors, both from the past and in the house, their reaction is not to address them but to defend themselves by rallying around their family structure. In this way, the home becomes a literal and metaphorical battleground over their internal values regarding capitalism, privilege, and status. Luke seems to be the most threatened, exploding in a racist tirade over the interracial couple that lives nearby and secretly stockpiling guns. But both parents’ instincts are to protect their family by isolating it from the outside world and the racist history behind their upper middle-class status.
And as Iijima moves her readers through the story, the schism between internal protected values and projection becomes more and more difficult to disguise. In the house, the ghosts of two women who died under mysterious circumstances become commentators on the family’s lives that Sue can constantly hear. But also, the children who are still impressionable and less padlocked to their parents’ values begin to challenge them. Caroline becomes transfixed by environmental doom, and no amount of mood stabilizers can break her out of her despondence about the world. Wheatly increasingly feels under threat, even bringing one of his dad’s guns to school for protection. He withdraws further and further into himself, becoming lost first in fantasy stories, and then obsessively reading the New York Times, developing a relationship to the world that is entirely theoretical and not based in human interaction or experience. As they mature, Caroline especially begins to question the fabric of the reality she is experiencing, poking at the inconsistencies in the family’s life and in the values they espouse. And the one thing Sue can’t ignore, the one part of her that is still fused to human connection, is her instinct to protect her children.
In the background of all these happenings are the consistent haunted house occurrences like nightmares, blood, déjà vu, and ghosts. While these events are disconcerting, they do not drive plot or action. Instead, they hover in the background. Sue worries she might be losing her mind, but the intense paranoia and slow-burning tension that builds in the shadows isn’t from the horror elements of the novel, but from the disconnect between her outward projections and her internal values that she keeps suppressed.
In this way, Shelter Is Necessary for Existence is more psychological than horror. For her readers, Iijima succeeds by showing us the guilt and defensive measures her protagonist derives subconsciously in order to justify her privilege. And the really scary part is how disconnected upper-class Americans are from nature and community because of an unconscionable history of violence and consumption that they cannot face.
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The Call is Coming From Inside the House: On the Horror of Privilege in Brenda Iijima’s Shelter is Necessary for Existence
FICTION REVIEW
Image by Mariana Montrazi from Pexels
Michael Harper teaches at Northern New Mexico College. He received his MFA from the University of Idaho. His most recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, X-R-A-Y, Hobart, Fugue, Terrain.org, The Los Angeles Review, and others.
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