Known for editing Fence fiction and co-founding Cash 4 Gold Books, Harris Lahti’s debut prose, Foreclosure Gothic presents itself with highs and lows, the underside of the once-coined-and-believed “American dream.”
The novel traces Vic and Heather, a young couple from Hollywood to upstate New York, where both characters seek then renovate auctioned foreclosures amidst rural Americana. —Anything north of New York sprawls like a vast sort of death trap, Lahti narrates.
Speaking of agrarian Americana and Lahti’s generational story, a reader may or may not ruminate on Grant Wood’s 1930s American Gothic, though in his contemporary cocktail of “arcane” meets “working class,” Lahti marvels and weaves something far more offbeat.
Perhaps it’s that bitter, haunting everydayness that gets dissected—from a horrid garbageman renter, an eerie hole in the wall and otherworldly occurences… to crooked, gnarly overgrown vegetables—poking from the pores of the novel that got me, and particularly my attention.
Perhaps it’s seemingly “normcore” characters, their unmasked descriptions, the way ordinariness proposes itself as a foreplay for something greater, murkier than its surface. As if something eerie can be scooped out of the otherwise seemingly tacky ice cream cone while one reads further on. Just as Junior, the couple’s son, says, A pregnant woman died. She was buried in the garden—one of his first words. And it’s precisely at this point of reading when Lahti’s novel targets your heartbeat with a lofty rave. It doses you with something close to a speedball.
As per the cover, I was reminded of The Blair Witch Project, then to my bewilderment, plunging my mind inside the storyline felt more like excavating a corroded Cady Noland stainless sculpture, buried deep down, creeping from the black damp soil, wanting you to know it’s right there, ready to be dug out, and read in the glimmer of the daylight.
With my gaze stapled inside the galleys, and a random NTS mix looming from the background, I also noted Ethel Cain-ed shivers and almost Evanesence-type of light swarming through the kernel of my mind. A make-believe soundtrack to one of the novel’s murkiest yet wry sentences with which Lahti approaches the bleakness of a middle-class—She turns to him, wide eyed and oddly luminous in the dark, and says, They died here, didn’t they, doc? Just look at the shape of this place. I’m afraid this is more crypt than home.
Recently, Ottessa Moshfegh wrote a 10-character campaign for Prada. In light of this, I teetered a query about what fashion brand Lahti’s Foreclosure Gothic would describe and match to. And what popped out is someone like Collina Strada, maybe Eckhaus Latta and Vaquera, too, or a very early Rodarte, but that’s just another story, a review to spill.
