Keeper of Enchanted Rooms belongs to a subgenre of paranormal stories concerning houses that harbor ghosts or possess supernatural abilities. Though ghost stories exist in cultural traditions from around the world, the haunted house developed during the rising popularity of Gothic literature that emerged during the Romantic period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in popular books like Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). The premise of ghosts inhabiting a neglected home and influencing the lives of those within it also appear in classic works like Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw (1898) and the short story “A Haunted House” (1921) by Virginia Woolf.

In American literature, classic works like The House of the Seven Gables (1861) by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which also takes place in a remote locale in the northeastern United States, and The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson further developed the device of the house that gains inimical influence through the human crimes enacted within it. More recent novels like

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