Review of "Rose/House" by Arkady Martine

I received an ARC of this book from Subterranean Press in exchange for an honest review. This review will not contain any spoilers. 

Experienced readers of this blog (are there any of them out there, besides...me?) will notice that Rose/House has already appeared on my "best of 2022" list, so it should be little surprise that I found this novella to be an incredible step up from an author I already held in high regard. Pivoting from the space opera of the Teixcalaan duology to a near-future horror-tinged haunted house story infused with a practitioner's knowledge of architecture and urban planning, Arkady Martine takes a huge left turn without ever leaving her wheelhouse. Despite the radically different setting, Rose/House continues Martine's exploration of many of the same themes from those novels--personhood and exclusion, constructed spaces and their influence, mysterious alien entities with terrifying goals. After being somewhat too genre-savvy to truly appreciate the aliens in A Desolation Called Peace (the big reveal that explained their way of thinking, and the ultimate resolution of their conflict with Teixcalaan, fell too close to other first contact stories to land the way it might have for a new reader), I was amazed and terrified by the genuinely alien mind of Rose House. Rather than merely being a "haunted house," a disembodied spirit living inside a non-human shell, Rose House is described as a "haunt," an embodied being that is the house, and in being a house has ways of thinking that are impossibly foreign to the people walking through its halls. Time and again Martine drives home the connection between mind and body, making the experience of being inside Rose House intensely spooky and keeping me looking over my shoulder for a ghostly presence that, in this case, was in fact already surrounding me. Detective Maritza Smith (or should I call her China Lake Precinct?) serves as a satisfyingly curious point of entry (literally) into Rose House and is the audience's true interpreter,  while Dr. Selene Gisil serves not so much as a mouthpiece for the haunt as an extension of its influence. As with A Memory Called Empire, the murder mystery that instigates the story is satisfyingly resolved, but the story's true interest lies elsewhere, in the surroundings and mechanisms that caused the murder to take place and the machinations that continue long after the body is gone. Several passages of Rose/House will stay with me for a long time (the initial naming of China Lake Precinct; an aside about how spaces shape and are read by their inhabitants; several different retellings of a murder) but the haunting, worrying, ominous ending will perhaps linger longest of all. This is a novella worth savoring; it uses every page and character to maximal effect and leaves the reader torn between wanting more and feeling lucky that putting the book down provides an easy escape.

Five out of five stars. An atmospheric, spooky story with genuinely alien minds, striking questions, and beautifully terrifying scenery.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review of "Prophet" by Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché

I received an ARC of this book from Grove Atlantic in exchange for an honest review. This review will not contain any spoilers.  My prior experience with Helen Macdonald was limited to her nature writing (I loved Vesper Flights ) but when I saw she was co-writing a thriller with science-fiction elements, I thought it would be worth a look. Especially in its opening section, Prophet delivers several moments that recall Macdonald's careful attention to the natural world and gift for writing characters who are, via observation, trying to piece together a framework through which to understand it. Towards the end, several moments of near-horror recall her story "Deer in the Headlights," which uses that same precise prose to great effect in showing us a world that is subtly wrong in unsettling ways. At various points in the book, characters are able to spontaneously generate objects and scenes with nostalgic value--from teddy bears to 1950s diners to arcade games--and these...
Read more

Review of "The Strange" by Nathan Ballingrud

I received an ARC of this book from Saga Press in exchange for an honest review. This review will not contain any spoilers.  While I am a big fan of Westerns on the screen, I've never felt any particular interest in seeking them out on the page. Still, when I read an excerpt of The Strange on Tor.com, I was immediately reminded of the Coen brothers' classic film True Grit (2010). When the blurb for the book mentioned it as well, I decided to get a jump-start on the release date next week and went looking for this advance copy. What I found was a compelling story that ended up drifting a little too far from its initial promise for my taste, but still kept me engaged for a weekend and brought some of the classic Western elements to a new setting. Annabelle Crisp is not quite a ringer for True Grit's Mattie Ross (if you haven't seen True Grit , stop reading this review and go watch it! Nobody does dialogue better than the Coen brothers, and Hailee Steinfeld knocks it ou...
Read more

Review of "Jade Shards" by Fonda Lee

I received an ARC of this book from Subterranean Press in exchange for an honest review. This review will not contain any spoilers for Jade Shards but will discuss characters and events from the Green Bone Saga. After her previous follow-up novella, The Jade Setter of Janloon , Fonda Lee returns to the setting of her Green Bone Saga with four short stories about the pro- and an-tagonists: Ayt Mada, Kaul Lan, Kaul Hilo/Maik Wen, and Kaul Shae. Each adds some backstory to characters that we see grow and change through the main novels and largely succeeds at delivering the kind of intimate character moments I appreciated from Lee's writing.  In "The Witch and Her Friend," we get to see Ayt Mada's rise through the eyes of Anden's mother Aun Ure. The story does an excellent job of showing how the two girls' friendship, which began in school, gradually fades as they choose different paths in adulthood. Aun Ure's decision to step back from life as a Green Bone ...
Read more