Holy smokes this was an enrapturing book. Over 600 pages, and I binged it over the course of four days. It’s postured as a horror story, and it totally delivers. Not only is it extremely spooky to read, but it has an eerie, infectious quality that left me thinking about it hours after I’d stopped reading it. It infected my dreams, too.

However, the book doesn’t sit neatly within the rest of the genre of horror; Stephen King fans wouldn’t necessarily enjoy this book. A lot of the horror comes from the unsettling, unmoored nature of the book’s narrative - the structure of storylines is jumbled, and obscured, and the reader is often led to confuse how “real” different parts of the book are meant to be. Blurring the lines of fiction and reality happens in layers and layers within the book.

The peculiarities of titular House leave it well-suited as an object of projection - I’ve found myself thinking about the house several times since finishing the book, as a metaphor for various other things. It sticks with you. I don’t know a lot about the intentions of the author, or what he was aiming for… but this is a damn fine work of literature.