“If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You” by Leigh Stein is a delightfully unhinged contemporary Gothic set against the world of social media influencers. Set in a decaying Hollywood mansion, it features five TikTok stars (called “the platform” in the book, but we all know …), plus one missing star, their manager/minder, and the brother and sister who own the house, who are competing for likes and follows and lucrative marketing contracts while fending off over-zealous fans, various nervous conditions, and possibly the cursed house itself.
The book starts in a bit of a rom com mode — one of the narrators, Dayna, has just suffered a public break-up via a viral Reddit post, and accepts the offer from Craig, the Deckler Mansion’s owner with whom she had a fraught online relationship twenty years ago, to join the “hype house” as a sort of manager cum babysitter for its twenty-something stars. Things quickly turn darker, though, when a new star, Olivia, arrives; she’s a self-styled “orphan” after her parents died in a tragic car accident, and she has come to the Deckler Mansion not only to build a social media career but also to search for the missing star, Becca, whose strange tarot card reading videos have drawn her from North Dakota.
Stein weaves together threads of “Rebecca,” “Alice in Wonderland,” and the tarot, which clash in interesting and complicated ways with the hyper-contemporary TikTok culture. It’s deeply Gothic, complete with secret passageways, uncertain familial relationships, and tragic history, and also unflinchingly post-modern.
