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WesternSFA


Man, Fuck This House
by Brian Asman
Mutated Media, $10.99, 208pp
Published: October 2021

Yes, that's a catchy title indeed for my Books of Horror choice this month but it's a catchy book too and I have no bias towards the fact that the male lead is named Hal. I felt more kinship to his son, a precocious little Damien, even though I was never quite as twisted as he is. I have no doubt that the choice of name there was deliberate, even if Hal and Sabrina, plus their other child, Michaela, have names just for the sake of having them.

Ostensibly, it's a haunted house story in the vein of 'The Amityville Horror'. It's there in the title, a delightfully simple cover and in the house being the first character to be introduced in the prose. It certainly plays out like a haunted house story, beginning with the Haskins family moving into their new home in Jackson Hill, somewhere in the American southwest, having vacated their old place in Columbus, Ohio after Hal took a big promotion at work that required this move.

Certainly, Sabrina, who's the one stuck in the house on her own while Hal goes to work and the kids go to school, seems to think she's in a haunted house story. Things change. The shower curtain had ducks on it five minutes ago but now it's plain white. Doorknobs jiggle for no apparent reason. The bath can't seem to make up its mind whether it's full or not. Worst of all, some dude who shouldn't be there hauls a box downstairs and then vanishes into the crawlspace. Literally. Of course, nobody believes her, even though they leave and she's stuck there, because her car hasn't arrived yet.

However, two things make us wonder about this. One is the fact that nothing the house does, if the house does anything, is malevolent. It's weird and freaky but the house doesn't seem to want to be harmful. If anything, it's actively trying to help, which is something very different. Sure, this has an overtly comedic side, something that can't be denied in the final chapters, but we're not expecting Casper the Friendly Ghost in a book called 'Man, Fuck This House'. The other factor is Damien.

We learn early on that Damien, who's currently ten but enticingly older than his years, was one of a pair of twins but he absorbed the other in the womb. That's hardly a deliberate act, of course, so nobody should blame him for it, but there's a part of Sabrina that does, that seems him as a sort of grown-up cannibal foetus and treats him differently because of that unfair bias. Damien, who's as sharp as a tack, notices this even though nobody else does and so torments his mother as a hobby. He's playing a very long game to mess with her mind and we can't help but wonder if whatever this house is doing is really at his bidding. Certainly it's texting him frequently.

And so we meet the Haskins at a pivotal moment. They've just moved halfway across the country, a traumatising change in the best of scenarios, especially for the kids. I was twelve when my dad got a new job and we moved from the urban south of England to the rural north, halfway across a much smaller country but just as impactful. Much adjustment was needed. Add to that the fact that this Hal is as oblivious to what's going on as my neurodivergent brain would likely be in this scenario, to both the wife who's having a nervous breakdown and the son who's plotting dark revenge on her. It therefore falls on Michaela to save the day and she's not in a position to do much of that.

Brian Asman trawls a surprising amount of sympathy out of us in a short amount of pages, until he decides that it's time to just go hog wild. I'm not going to spoil how he does, but I'll emphasise that he does it with abandon. Whatever we think this book is—a horror novel, a drama, a comedy, a look at the dynamics of a nuclear family—it becomes something else and it's safe to say that you're not going to be ambivalent about how. Either you're going to love it or you're going to hate it. I should hate it, but I think I love it. I think this change works well with Asman's surreal sense of humour and also epitomises the flip dismissal of the title.

And that's all I'm going to say, because it would be too easy to delve into spoiler territory. This looks like it's a novel, clocking in two hundred pages exactly, but it's shorter than it seems. The font size is larger than we might expect and there are plenty of blank pages as we move from day to day. It's possible that this is a long novella but I'm thinking a short novel and it reads even quicker. This is a book to blitz through in a single session, if you don't throw it down in disgust when it reaches that crucial point of change. And, if you keep turning pages, you're going to love it. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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