Book Review: "Clean" by Alia Trabucco Zerán

Yes, I was perusing the cheapest possible books on the Kindle store again and yes, I was looking for things that were toeing the lines of psychological horror. It's currently late March of 2025 and I have enjoyed rediscovering one of my favourite subgenres: psychological horror. After folk horror, it has to be up there somewhere and I'm not going to lie when I tell you that there is a lot of great modern stuff out there. From the 'haunted house with a strange twist' novel to the 'good for her' narratives, from the 'dark past' characters to the 'Norman Rockwell painting' horrors, this subgenre has only grown with the 21st century. I am totally here for it. Clean is a book about a house maid driven to her limits in a life which feels strangely disconnected...

Estela is a housemaid for a rich family, initially where the wife is pregnant but eventually gives birth to a tempermental baby girl named Julia. Referred to mainly as 'the girl', Estela is now also tasked with feeding and bathing the child on top of her usual routines. Every Monday, for example, Estela cleans the house top to bottom in a 'deep clean' style. This seems all well and good for Estela at first even though the baby is prone to screaming and food aversion. However, as the child starts to grow it becomes more of a problem.

No longer does a simple serving of mashed banana work, but instead 'the girl' begins to make demands of Estela. One of these is that she seems to not enjoy school, often feigning illness to come home and play with toys. Another is that she forces Estela to play with her when the maid clearly has other things that need doing. As the girl becomes more demanding and spoilt, Estela slowly gets pushed to the end of her tether whilst the parents of the child remain ignorant to all of this - often pushing their own daughter away from them emotionally.

The author depicts their talents for the narrative in the way in which we may know about the maid's life before her job but we don't actually know her personality from anyone apart from her. This multilayered version of the unreliable narrator is brilliant when we come to considering that we are working towards something terrible happening and a woman only talking to us from behind a closed door. The metaphor works brilliantly with the themes of the book.

As life becomes more unbearable for the maid, we get small flashbacks into her own life with her mother - including lessons she was taught as a child concerning topics like death. She begins getting up to clandestine activities such as bringing a stray dog to the property whilst the mother and father of the girl are at work, allowing the girl to play with a dog. Unfortunately, this does not go as well as she thinks. Finally, she gets a phone call from her cousin in which she is given horrifying news and yet - without the money and time to do so - she cannot return home as it would take far too long.

Life back home goes on without her and, in agonising physical and emotional pain, she continues. Agreeing she is treated fairly well, she eventually goes back on that when she begins to see the cracks in life. The husband/father is a emotionless hateful man and the wife/mother is a superficial airhead. Both of them have separate issues in their private lives which only maids get to see.

The author writes this brilliantly and works in another issue which sets the parents apart from their daughter. This is culminated in imagery of guns, rats and blood. This symbolism a fantastic addition to the deeper meaning of humane treatment in the novel - the classism shining through in New Years' Parties and armed robberies.

All in all, it is a darkly comical and yet psychologically terrifying novel that turns on the cusp of what it means to be a fully fledged human being and what it means to only be half a human. As the novel increases in tension, there are events that make us really realise what the difference between the two is.