Rose/House

I love my October traditions. The last few years, one of them has been for my wife and I to choose a horror movie theme and watch a bunch of classics. This year's theme is haunted houses, a fact I had no idea would be relevant when I decided to pick up Arkady Martine's latest release.

My only complaint is that I wish it were three or four times as long. There's so much going on here conceptually, architecture (conveyed incredibly well through prose) that creates personhood that creates architecture, the idea of "haunting" as a superposition of power and imprisonment, the gradient of personhood between an individual and an institution. Martine is one of the best to be currently doing it.

Kudos to Arkady Martine for publishing something very different from her breakthrough novel, A Memory Called Empire.

Hauntingly strange, this murder in an AI mystery house is a bit of a slog, and I'm not at all sure I understand what happened.

It does manage to convey the uncanny vibe I think Arkady was aiming for an in that manner it is a successful Novella.