Weird fiction, so often, is a marriage between the supernatural and the absurd. It’s through this lens that we see some of its most striking works. Kafka’s Metamorphosis comes to mind, where a man becomes a bug and from that unreality blossoms a story that interrogates reality. This, ultimately, I like to think, is the goal of Weird fiction—to dismantle our surroundings with a soundly strange aberration. If you imagine your immediate world, and make one thing wrong, it necessarily calls into question the rightness of everything around it. Danger Slater’s House of Rot works in this vein, although to say it is a comrade of Kafka’s is to also say it has kin with Cronenberg, the bizarro movement, and many others who make ooey-gooey horror with social commentary. Ultimately though, most readers will just be satisfied with a fun, readable story, with gross-out moments to spare. House of Rot excels here as well.
Slater’s novella centers around a young (but not that young) couple who have just moved into a new apartment. The first chapter explodes off the page with voice to spare. It is immediate, irreverent, funny, and slightly sinister. And really, I think it is Slater’s voice that is the unofficial third main character of House of Rot. He provides asides, dashes of humor, prophetorial exposition that makes the novella feel like it isn’t just a story, but an old story. A modern fable coming from the lips of an omniscient, streetwise smartass who’s seen it all before, and knows what horrors lurk beyond our immediate comprehension.
The crux of the story is our young couple coming to grips with the sheen of mold that at first appears as a disappointing flaw in their new living space, but then becomes its defining feature—locking them into their new apartment as the fungus spreads and spreads. All the while, their neighbor provides cryptic amusement while slamming down six packs of Hamm’s from a window. From there, things get gorey and gross as bodily functions are undermined in extravagant fashion.
If this sounds strange, it’s because it is. House of Rot is a weird fucking book. But it’s also so grounded in the millennial experience it’s hard not to find it relatable. There’s lots of commentary in here about millennials growing older and still struggling to make good on the American dream. Our characters in House of Rot are in their thirties and still living in apartments. They shroud their frustration and insecurities with endless irony, even as they’re literally falling apart. Because of this, in spite of its exceeding weirdness, House of Rot feels deeply relevant. The rot here is imbued with a sense of time and place—namely, now—and through it we gain a thoughtful exploration of aging millennial malaise.
But more importantly than all of that—House of Rot is plain old fun. I finished it in one sitting (In my apartment, two weeks from my thirty-third birthday. Yikes.) and found it to be lively and compulsively readable. It’s the sort of book that swallows you up, where you’re helpless to do anything but say to yourself: well, okay—maybe just one more chapter.
House of Rot is a fast-paced, thoughtful, and hilarious novella that is an ode to a generation’s shared depression. Propelled by its author’s inimitable voice and energy, it manages to take the fun of body horror and elevate it into economic discourse that never feels like a righteous diatribe, or worse: an afterthought.
Come for the Weird, stay for the ride—House of Rot drags its readers through a shared fever dream of apartment-sized proportions.