Naughty Words, Scary Houses

This will be a short post, but I just wanted to recommend Brian Asman’s MAN, FUCK THIS HOUSE. The novella, published in 2021, follows a family who realizes their new house is not what it appears to be.

It was interesting reading this so quickly after watching Steven Soderbergh’s PRESENCE, a post-modern haunted house film told through the ghost's perspective. With its swooping camera work and melancholy narrative, PRESENCE takes the tonal feels of a gothic haunted house story and transports it into modern post-POLTERGEIST suburbia, where sunlight invades every nook and cranny of a home. While Hooper’s film defined many of the trappings of modern haunted house stories, PRESENCE feels like a movie several generations away from scary clowns and killer trees. The family in PRESENCE is too distracted by real-life nightmares like online bullying, the fentanyl crisis, and shady business dealings to worry about floating books or doors that open and close on their own. It’s a ghost movie without any boos. That said, for all its grounded approach, PRESENCE - while an entertaining film, never feels quite as relatable as MAN, FUCK THIS HOUSE. Who would have guessed that the book with the naughty word in its title would strike more emotional chords for me than Soderberg’s film, which spends 80 minutes building towards a primal scream of pain?

I don’t want to reveal too much of the plot of Asman’s novella since it’s such a quick read, but what impressed me the most about the book - besides the fully-fleshed out characters that gave the book its hefty emotional punch despite its short page count - is its delicate balance of humor and horror. Writing a horror-comedy is not an easy thing. It’s too easy to tip the balance in one direction or another - too much comedy deflates the tensions of the scares, and too much horror makes the comedy feel out of place and forced. Asman’s novella takes an admittedly silly premise (one that only gets sillier as the book goes on) and funnels it through harrowing scares made even scarier by his narrative voice. The book is not afraid to get dark, but (despite the fears one might have regarding a book with “fuck” in its title), this darkness never feels like edge lord postering. It’s a dark book because the inside of the human soul can be a dark place. But, even as the book dips its toes into some incredibly dark subject matter, it still manages to be incredibly funny. More so, the zanier elements of Asman’s concepts feel earned because we see them through the eyes of authentic characters who act authentically.

There’s a reason why the book is called MAN, FUCK THIS HOUSE, after all.

This is the first of Asman’s books I’ve read, but I’m excited to check out more of his stuff, especially the werewolf book he published last year.