This article explores how acts of renovation in Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News (1993) are vital to the novel’s deployment of a series of Gothic tropes. The major renovation of an abandoned house belonging to the family of Quoyle, the protagonist, is one of the novel’s central plot points. Sara Wasson tells us that “Gothic sites are regularly threatened by a return of old horror or atavistic decline” (2013, 132) and the house in this novel appears as an overtly Gothic space that contains traces of many traumatic events in the current, recent and long-past lives of the family that has always inhabited it. In acquiescing to his aunt’s insistence at the beginning of the novel that they renovate and live in the house, Quoyle unwittingly becomes the recipient of the dark inheritance of the Green House and the many violent acts that have been committed there. In my textual analysis of The Shipping News, I examine how the uncanny effects of renovation are represented in Proulx’s work, which is not positioned to be read as a Gothic novel, but which incorporates a number of Gothic tropes, the renovation plot being the most extensive and overt of these. I also discuss the Gothic distortions of perspective and scale (Reynolds 2013, 89) that take place on a physical and psychological level throughout the renovation, as well as Proulx’s fragmentary, imagistic evocation of the house as a powerful figure of unhomely agency that complicates and endangers the redemptive process of Quoyle’s self-renewal.