(This review is by Cody Lakin, author of The Family Condition. Check it out, you’ll be glad that you did. And you can purchase House of Windows at this link. It’s also on Kindle Unlimited, a hell of a deal if I ever saw one. — Mike Davis)

Recently I finished reading House of Windows, the first novel from John Langan. I first discovered Langan with The Fisherman, a seismic discovery in my love affair with literary horror fiction. I mean, that book follows me around and keeps speaking to me, sometimes in whispers, sometimes in shouts.

House of Windows is easily one of the more unique and ambitious haunted house novels I’ve ever read, not only for the clever and mercurial twists it puts on otherwise familiar ideas—in addition to its stunning original ones—but for the depths of interiority it explores with its complex human characters. The nuanced and detailed manner in which it explores the relationships—father and son, husband and wife, et al—would put this book at home among great works of introspective, character-driven literary fiction, the kind which capture the difficult and dark realities of being human, except that it’s also a brilliant, intellectual, and emotional horror novel.

I have a weakness for such things as vivid voices in fiction (especially when they’re realistically unreliable), for nested narratives, for slow-burns, for flawed and human characters brought to life, and for the vulnerability some writers bring to the page. This book rewards in spades. Even when it presents a challenge in what could be considered its density, it’s a credit to the quality of the writing and storytelling that I was rapt from beginning to end. I came away from these pages feeling a sense of loss that there weren’t more pages to turn, that there wasn’t more time to spend with these messy people I came to know so well. I found myself wondering, What’s next for them? How will they carry on from here? And, perhaps most important to me—and most inspiring—I felt an aching sense of emotional truth at the heart of this novel, a vulnerability in its threads.

This novel is, to me, a rare and precious thing. Other than horror, my favorite genre is literary fiction. House of Windows truly embodies what a literary horror novel can be, in the craft not only of its themes and characters, but in its language.

Speaking as a writer myself who aspires to literary horror—hoping not to be presumptuous in that—this book made me feel brave. Like finding a kindred spirit. Speaking as a reader, it simply made me feel full and grateful for its existence, that there are such works as this in the genre. It’s a beautiful, tragic, haunting story, and it’s going to linger with me for a long time.

(This review is by Cody Lakin, author of The Family Condition. Check it out, you’ll be glad that you did. And you can purchase House of Windows at this link. It’s also on Kindle Unlimited, a hell of a deal if I ever saw one. — Mike Davis)

(Mike here again: The panelists and I have been recommending books on the Lovecraft eZine Podcast for years. The “complaint” that I receive from listeners is that we add a lot to their TBR! 🙂 Well, I’ll be adding to your t0-be-read list even more from now on in this blog, with reviews by Cody Lakin, myself, and others that I won’t mention yet. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

So stay tuned! Simply enter your email address below. Unsubscribe any time.)