This novella slaps, and I can’t talk about it until everyone reads it, so go read it. Do you know what I need more of? Science fiction architecture stories. There feels like there is a real untapped potential here. I want to see buildings brimming with strange technology. I want to see how the people of tomorrow are going to live their daily lives. Show me what would happen if Frank Lloyd Wright went insane and built a superhouse with a terrifying AI… is the premise of Rose/House by Arkady Martine.

Basit Deniau built the most desirable houses in the world, and all of them are haunted. His houses are embedded with artificial intelligence to be every inch of the domicile. Every tile, every nail, every bolt, and every blade of grass on the lawn is known, monitored, and controlled by a powerful localized AI. No one knows how Deniau did it, but every architecture firm on the planet would kill to find out. Too bad the passage of time beat them to it. Deniau’s been dead a year, and Rose House (his greatest achievement) is locked up tight, as commanded by the architect’s will. This house made of glass and crystal sits in the center of a desert, a monument to the hubris of men and their will to build where they are not meant to. In the basement of Rose House sits all of Deniau’s files and sketches, an archive of treasures. Atop this hoard of knowledge the AI of Rose House sits, like a cyberdragon, letting no one in - with one exception.

Dr. Selene Gisil, Deniau’s former protégé, is permitted to come into Rose House once a year. She alone may open Rose House’s vaults, look at drawings and art, and talk with Rose House’s animating intelligence. But, the AI one day reports the presence of a dead body in the house to the nearest law enforcement. Detective Maritza Smith has been handed an impossible case, and calls the only possible suspect, Gisil, and asks her to come in. Together, Gisil and Smith head out to the Rose House to pull this puzzle apart one wall at a time.

This little locked room mystery is a blast. Martine really nails the atmospheric dread of this setting, making the AI of Rose House unbelievably creepy and disturbing. On top of that, the characters are classic detective story headliners. The cop who doesn’t stop working on a case even when her paycheck and workload demands it. The wary partner who thinks there is better shit to do than enter a literal haunted house. The one person, Dr. Gisil, clearly connected to the case who wants nothing to do with it, but can’t seem to get away. And then there is Rose/House itself, the omniscient AI presence that dominates the space, following specific logic branches, and giving up nothing in the way of clues. It feels like what would happen if you injected a sphinx with computer code creating a cyberpunk guardian. There is a very cool experiment with localized omnipotence and omnipresence in this novella. I loved the idea of a tiny god whose domain was two floors of a two thousand square foot home. It added to the claustrophobia while making the house feel like an endless labyrinth that characters could disappear into.

Rose/House feels purposefully designed to fuck with the reader. The easiest way to explain Martine’s approach to the murder mystery is “just the facts ma’am,” but weaponized to the nth degree. Having read her previous novels, I was prepared for a flurry of disconnected information and events that eventually exploded in perfect harmony to dazzling fanfare. Instead, Martine seems hell bent on making that virtually impossible within Rose/House, to great effect. The writing is clinical, purposeful, and devoid of emotion.. Its tension is found between the lines. The reader is forced to constantly question what is being presented to them, and fill in the blanks where only shadows may exist. The approach is not an anathema to the genre, but instead invites the reader directly to ponder the true nature of the mystery at hand, one the author doesn't have a full answer to.

I found myself compelled more by Martine’s laser-like focus on the dissection of language. Already strong within her Teixcalaan novels, Rose/House felt like it was mainlining this theme through an intravenous feed turned to eleven. Every interaction has at least two different meanings. Interfacing with the house itself was a lesson in translation, one that plays with the concept of “what is human?” It’s not just your standard “human nature” vs “artificial intelligence.” It runs deeper, questioning how language develops categories of separation, and how that separation carries internal logics that must be learned, tested and taught in vicious feedback loops. The novella then goes on to showcase how these loops create the concept of human and “inhuman,” in ways both exciting and deeply terrifying. So when the final reveal of everything that happened within the house makes its way to your eyes, you can’t help but feel a little robbed, because there is still work to do.

Weeks after finishing, I am still not sure what I think other than the surety that I enjoyed the journey. With great novellas always a difficulty to come by, it was fabulous to start the year with such a strong showing. Rose/House has a presence that can’t be ignored, its mystery inviting you into its cold maw. It wants you to read it, you had better comply.

Rating: Rose/House - 9.0/10
-Alex

It should not come as a shock that I love Arkady Martine and would love to read anything she writes - after A Memory Called Empire. Her writing is just so worth the work you have to put in sometimes - though I found that once I settled in to her style everything flowed perfectly for me. Rose/House is such an odd little novella. I love a good haunted house/sentient house/house with motives/house as main character moment and to couple that trope with an actual AI within the home? And a murder? You're in for a wild ride. This one settles in slowly, almost hauntingly, and it's all too easy to imagine this happening in the world. Yet that is always the best part of speculative fiction/speculative sci-fi. I highly recommend this for fans of Martine's work or any one who enjoys a mysterious little break from their current reading plans.

I have a permanent crush on Arkady Martine’s brain. She fit so much worldbuilding and character into such a slim novella including multiple POVs. I already highly anticipated her next set of novels but now everything she writes is an automatic preorder.

Ever since the death of famed architect Basit Deniau, Rose House has been sealed to the public. Deniau's will decreed that only his protégé Dr. Selene Gisil could have access to the house, an order that has been enforced by the AI that is built into every wall and beam and tile of the building. It has been months since Dr. Gisil has visited Rose House, and yet one day, the police contact her to inform her that the AI of Rose House has reported a dead body on the premises. Only with Dr. Gisil's help can Detective Maritza Smith hope to investigate who managed to break into the house - and more importantly, who killed them.

ROSE/HOUSE is an interesting premise that doesn't have nearly enough runway to deliver. I desperately wish this novella had been twice as long, because all the right pieces are there: a locked house mystery, an atmospheric and creepy AI, a detective trying to navigate its interaction with that AI to get the pieces she needs to solve the crime. Unfortunately, the novella is so overstuffed with plot elements that the dreamlike prose renders the story more muddled than haunting.

There were parts of this book I really liked. The author manages to deftly paint a picture of the state of the world a few hundred years in the future, describing certain automated services, an increase in water theft as the primary source of crime, and other little details that immediately gives you a sense of place. The detective's interaction with the AI itself is clever, first in how the detective convinces the AI of a loophole that gains her access to Rose House, and then in how the detective reads between the lines of what the AI is or isn't saying, or what things interest the AI to discuss. It reminded me a little bit of Alex Garland's movie EX MACHINA, where a human and an AI have several conversations together, where the human is trying to feel out the rules for how the AI processes information.

But even those good moments feel rushed when there's another detective outside the house discovering new details about who could have been involved in the murder, a third party who is also trying to gain access to the house, and Dr. Gisil is processing some very complicated feelings about her relationship with the architect Deniau. Add on top of that some very flowery prose, and I struggled at times to tell where the book was going, what the end point or goal was.

ROSE/HOUSE has a lot of promise, but for me at least, the pieces didn't come together into a cohesive whole. This felt like a book that needed more time to simply "sit" with the atmosphere, to let the strange, ghost-like AI unnerve you and get under your skin. Instead, it felt like a rushed dream that didn't make its intentions clear.

Rose/House was a new author for me. I loved the feel of this story and the dread that underlies it all. Shown through multiple points of view, Rose House is a new take on a locked room mystery. In a dry and desolate future in which China Lake, not far from me and known as a base and not a town, is remote and practically abandoned. It is strangely the home of the most advanced AI house in existence. Unfortunately, that house is closed off to the world when its architect died.

In a final act of jackassery, he leaves his home to a former student of his who broke away from him long ago. She can enter the house for 7 days a year to serve as his archivist. Dr. Gisil seems to not want this honorific. It’s not an honor. To the cult that has sprung up in his wake, it is everything.

This is a future of lawlessness. Electric houses and houses are the norm,but so id lawlessness. A sort of water world of highway robbery.

Rose House is beyond all others. It seems almost sentient. A miracle of architecture. Others want this. They want to make the world like Rose House. But they cannot get in.

The house calls the police, because in this reality they have to, to tell them that a dead body is inside. From here, everyone wants something and for few it is what they say.

I loved the entire ride of this novella. It makes me want to seek out its author. I want more.

Haunting and eerie while also being infuriatingly vague, Rose/House leads the reader through Rose House’s labyrinthine corridors with all the care of a classic gothic tale, despite being a futuristic story on all fronts: climate change, electric and self-driving cars, and of course AI.

The AI (the eponymous Rose House) was uncanny and strange, letting itself be tricked in order to play with the investigators, the murder victim, and its caretaker. But it existed in a way that didn’t feel malicious (the way a lot of fictional AI does), but alien: a creature of logic and asking questions to better understand the irrational nature of humans.

It felt haunting and ethereal while still testing the bounds of what humans will do. I always love a police procedural and Detective Maritza Smith was a fantastic mechanism for that: stubborn, invested, willing to go just a tick too far when she’s IN it. Acting like an AI was a nice touch and gave us a good peek at her mental state too.

TL;DR I was a fan

The premise of Rose/House was really interesting—someone had died in a house that no one could enter. Why could no one enter? Because that house was controlled by a powerful A.I. The novella is twisty and honestly I’m not sure anyone is real outside of the two cops that were introduced in the story. I’m not wholly convinced I was satisfied by the ending either. Oh well. Rose/House held my attention and was an intriguing ride while it lasted. I just wish it was a little bit more interested in compelling characters than twisty plots.

I loved the concept of this novella but quickly realized this one just was not for me. Though it is a novella, it is very dense to the point where it often feels like a slog. When you want detail the story is vague and where you want brevity the story pours out paragraphs. Nothing ever really clarifies and though there is a resolution it hardly feels like one and certainly not worth the grind to get there. Mostly I just felt frustrated trying to wrestle beautiful words into meaning. I think there is certainly an audience for this type of book but sadly I am not amongst them.

A nice little locked-room-ish book. The premise is neat -- dead body found in a sentient AI house, detective has to try to investigate while being very leery of the whole "sentient AI house" thing -- is fun, though things get a little predictable as soon as you realize "sentient AI house". It's a little barebones, but since it IS a little predictable that's not a bad thing. It's such a short book you kinda just get in and get out with a nice little taste of AI spookiness and get on with your day.

Thanks to NetGalley and Subterranean Press for the ARC.

My wife read and devoured this novella in a single sitting. She loved it.
For whatever reason I have not felt the pull to read it yet. So I am at least writing this. The five stars awarded are my spouses.

If you enjoyed Arkady Martine’s writing style and sci fi themes in her Teixcalaan series, you need to pick up Rose/House. This short novella is big in themes of AI and personhood, of artistic ownership and the lies we tell ourselves and others in order to advance our own agendas.

We’re mainly told the story through the eyes of Martinez, a detective contacted by the artificial intelligence that is Rose House, to learn that a person has been murdered within its walls, a person who was not supposed to be there. Martinez, along with Dr. Selene Gisil, a protege of Basit Deniau- the architect, creator and one who gave birth to Rose House, both need to find a way inside Rose House to solve the mystery.

This is not a straightforward mystery, however, so be forewarned. It gets complicated. Several other characters get a perspective in this 128 page novella, which at times felt like it weakened the story for me. For such a short book, I wished we would have just stuck to two main perspectives and been able to dig even deeper into the psychological state of the characters and explored the main themes further.

This is not an easy book to read, but if you take your time, you will be rewarded with a rich, reading experience. It’s a thought-provoking, intensely atmospheric novella that I will be thinking about for quite awhile.

*Thanks to NetGalley and Subterranean Press for the digital arc. All opinions are my own.

Is it a murder mystery, a haunted house tale, or an examination of artificial intelligence? Yes. All of the above. And very, very good. Rose House might not be haunted in the traditional sense, but the story will haunt me for a while. Publisher's Weekly was right to compare it to Shirley Jackson's Hill House, and yet not really accurate either.

It’s safe to say that Arkady Martine has exploded onto the scene, at least in the corners of genre fandom that saw her win Hugo Awards for both her first and second novels. I enjoyed A Desolation Called Peace enough to have it atop my own ballot last year, so I didn’t have to spend too much time convincing myself to pick up Rose/House, her new sci-fi mystery novella. 

Rose/House has a fairly straightforward setup as a locked room murder mystery, with an AI providing the sci-fi wrinkle. A smart house reports a dead body on the premises. That’s surprising, because it is locked tight against anyone but its late architect’s former protégé—it won’t even open to allow the local police to conduct an investigation. And so they must enlist the help of the only one who can get inside and get to the bottom of the mystery. 

One danger of reading a book before it’s widely reviewed is coming in with serious misconceptions about what to expect. On paper, Rose/House offers a fairly straightforward locked room murder mystery with a sci-fi twist. But as the story progresses, it becomes clear that the murder mystery is just an excuse for a beautiful and dreamlike series of musings about identity, personhood, and fraught mentorships. The identity of the dead man is hardly important, and the circumstances of the death matter more in how they made the house feel than in how he came to die. 

Ultimately, it’s more of a fever dream than a murder mystery. And I’m never quite sure what to take away from books that feel like fever dreams. The prose is beautiful, and there are so many passages ready to mine for reflections on personhood, self-deception, hero worship, and unhealthy mentor/student relationships. But at the same time, it never really feels like a cohesive whole, and two weeks after finishing, I don’t even remember whether they actually identified the murderer. It’s easy to say that it’s just not that kind of story, but I also tend to enjoy books more if I have something to hang onto at the end. 

For me, that comes out to something in the 3.5-star vicinity, but the numerical rating is less important here than making clear what sort of book to expect. Come here for prose, come here for philosophizing, come here for a fever dream. Just don’t come looking for a locked room mystery. Because at heart, that’s just not what this book is. 

Recommended if you like: fever dreams, beautiful prose, musings on identity and toxic mentorships. 

Overall rating: 14 of Tar Vol's 20. Four stars on Goodreads.

I received an ARC of this book from Subterranean Press in exchange for an honest review. This review will not contain any spoilers.

Experienced readers of my blog (are there any of them out there, besides...me?) will notice that Rose/House has already appeared on my "best of 2022" list, so it should be little surprise that I found this novella to be an incredible step up from an author I already held in high regard. Pivoting from the space opera of the Teixcalaan duology to a near-future horror-tinged haunted house story infused with a practitioner's knowledge of architecture and urban planning, Arkady Martine takes a huge left turn without ever leaving her wheelhouse. Despite the radically different setting, Rose/House continues Martine's exploration of many of the same themes from those novels--personhood and exclusion, constructed spaces and their influence, mysterious alien entities with terrifying goals. After being somewhat too genre-savvy to truly appreciate the aliens in A Desolation Called Peace (the big reveal that explained their way of thinking, and the ultimate resolution of their conflict with Teixcalaan, fell too close to other first contact stories to land the way it might have for a new reader), I was amazed and terrified by the genuinely alien mind of Rose House. Rather than merely being a "haunted house," a disembodied spirit living inside a non-human shell, Rose House is described as a "haunt," an embodied being that is the house, and in being a house has ways of thinking that are impossibly foreign to the people walking through its halls. Time and again Martine drives home the connection between mind and body, making the experience of being inside Rose House intensely spooky and keeping me looking over my shoulder for a ghostly presence that, in this case, was in fact already surrounding me. Detective Maritza Smith (or should I call her China Lake Precinct?) serves as a satisfyingly curious point of entry (literally) into Rose House and is the audience's true interpreter, while Dr. Selene Gisil serves not so much as a mouthpiece for the haunt as an extension of its influence. As with A Memory Called Empire, the murder mystery that instigates the story is satisfyingly resolved, but the story's true interest lies elsewhere, in the surroundings and mechanisms that caused the murder to take place and the machinations that continue long after the body is gone. Several passages of Rose/House will stay with me for a long time (the initial naming of China Lake Precinct; an aside about how spaces shape and are read by their inhabitants; several different retellings of a murder) but the haunting, worrying, ominous ending will perhaps linger longest of all. This is a novella worth savoring; it uses every page and character to maximal effect and leaves the reader torn between wanting more and feeling lucky that putting the book down provides an easy escape.

Five out of five stars. An atmospheric, spooky story with genuinely alien minds, striking questions, and beautifully terrifying scenery.

Lock the doors, silence your phone, curl up on the couch with a cocktail, and read this novella in one sitting. It will unsettle you in the best way possible. I'm calling it "gothic sci fi" and it is quickly becoming my favorite subgenre. The concept is stunning, the characters are mysterious, the house itself is...best experienced by reading the story without knowing too much beforehand. I have a feeling this one will slip under the radar but Arkady Martine has written a masterpiece of short sci fi. Noir sci fi, maybe. Either way, definitely try to get a copy of this one!

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Subterranean Press for an advanced copy of this novella by one of the most interesting and diverse writers in speculative fiction.

Two songs constantly played on the jukebox in my brain while reading the novella Rose/House by Arkady Martine, writer of the really excellent Teixcalaan Series. Both songs were from Tom Waits, and both from his elegiac album Mule Variations. 'The House Where Nobody Lives" with the lines: "There's a house on my block that's abandoned and cold/The folks moved out of it a long time ago/And they took all their things and they never came back/It looks like it's haunted with the windows all cracked/Everyone calls it the house/The house where nobody lives". And of course to those familiar with the album the song "What's He Building" with the song ending with "What's he building in there?/ What's he building in there?/ We have a right to know...". The album is the perfect soundtrack for this story which tells of a house, the secrets that lay within, art, technology, and good old human emotions.

The time is the near future when electric cars travel the roads, people attack others for water rations and laws are made to protect and oversee the rights of artifical intelligence controlled houses. Basit Deniau was one of the most prominent and respected architects of the time, his works, both contemplated and built, his thoughts and opinions studied and debated. Deniau's great and last work was the Rose House, a repository for his work, sketches, dreams unmet and work that were to never be, completely controlled by an artificial intelligence. Deniau's body was also placed inside, and his will written to only allow access once a year to one person for one week only, for research, as nothing could leave. This person Doctor Selene Gisil, was once his most devoted student, but has become Deniau's most ardent critic. Here last excursion in the house lasted three days, before she fled. Which creates a real mystery when the house itself calls the police to let them know a dead body has been found inside.

A short tale about art, admiration, design, the future, and who should be in charge of a legacy when someone is gone. Martine really outdoes herself in this story, changing styles for a story that is sometimes as cold as the artifical intelligence that runs Rose House, and yet, especially in the character of Detective Martiza Smith, is very human. The characters even the smallest are very interesting and a lot of the world in which they are living is told in dialogue and small talk. I liked that as it gets a lot of information presented quickly, and allows the story to move fast. Some readers might not like the distance kind of writing that starts the book, but it really does make the story, as language and nuance make up a big part of the plot. I must admit I am only familiar with Martine space series, so I don't know if other works are like this, but I was really impressed how different the story seemed, and really did enjoy it.

A ghost story for a more technological age. With more than a few ghosts haunting the characters. Recommended for fans of course, but also for people who like short stories with lot of punch and a lot to think about.

Rose/House is a science fiction novella from Arkady Martine about a sentient house and all it contains.
I loved Arkady Martine's previous works, so I was excited to read this novella, but this story is more experimental in language and structure than I prefer.

The story begins with Dr. Selene Gisil, the current owner of Rose House and its artificial intelligence. Selene is the estranged protégé of the house's inventor and receives a call from the local police about a murder on the property.

Detective Maritza Smith, the police officer who called Selene, is part of the tiny police force for this hole-in-the-wall town in the desert who's only claim to fame is Rose House.

As the two women meet and investigate the murder, the prose disintegrates, mirroring the interference of Rose House and the women's altered perceptions. In the end, I had little grasp on what really happened other than to be wary of the emergence of ChatGPT and other pseudo-AI programs as computers rarely act in the best interests of humans.

Thanks to NetGalley and Subterranean Press for access to an advanced e-copy of this novella for review.

Thank you NetGalley and Subterranean Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Basit Deniau's houses are haunted, but Rose House is maybe the most haunted of them all. Rose House is a house in the Mojave Desert that is also an artificial intelligence, and since Basit Deniau died, it's been locked up tight with only one person allowed in one week out of every year. Now, there's a dead body in Rose House when it should have been impossible for that to happen.

This is my first from Martine, and her prose is absolutely scintillating. I loved how easily she crafted the world in this novella, and how she dropped nuggets of information that were able to inform what the larger world looks like without distracting from the story, which is "who was murdered in Rose House, and who did the murdering?" I loved how Rose House had a personality and also remained firmly unfeeling AI, and I thought this was an interesting take on a creepy house and also what constitutes personhood/individuality. Still, while I loved this, the conclusion felt a bit weak compared to the rest of the novella, and while there's a lot of interesting things to ruminate on, I wish it just had a little more length to it.

Disclaimer: I received an ARC from NetGalley. My opinions are my own.

4/5 stars!

This is the second book I've read from Arkady Martine; in many ways, this novella is much different than A Memory Called Empire. Yet, similarly to A Memory Called Empire, the world that Martine builds feels *so* real. In this novella, a man is found dead in an empty house run by an AI. Except maybe the house *is* the AI and maybe the AI is the house.

Rose House belonged at one time and was built by a famous architect. After his death, he leaves the house and its archives to a student of his. For only seven days a year, Rose House will let her inside to look at the archives. But aside from her, no one is allowed inside the house. So when the local police precinct gets a call from Rose House itself saying that there is a dead man inside, everyone is confused how that's possible. Understandably. So unfolds a past-paced and short murder mystery novel centering around 2 dead men, one detective, a rather odd archivist, and Rose House--who is probably in love with its dead maker.

Even though this book was short, I read it (quickly) in small chunks. I wanted to savor the world and the mystery of what had happened. On the surface, it's a fairly standard "someone is found dead in a room with no windows or doors" mystery but with a twist. I really appreciated Martine's commentary on AI and emotion/intelligence. Now having read two of her books, I can confidently say that Martine's world-building is stunning. I would probably rank her in the top 3 for contemporary world-builders in the SF/F genre. The only reason that I didn't rate this a 5 star is because the ending left a *teeny* bit to be desired for. While interesting, the revelation of what happened and then the action after its revealed was too fast to have as much impact as it could have. But such is the way with novellas sometimes.

I would definitely recommend this book and this author.

The narrative was a bit confusing. I think Ms Martine is a fantastic writer, but the story seemed disjointed and difficult to follow. I liked the idea of Rose House - a unique AI that developed its own sinister personality - but much of the prose was too flowery and took away from the story itself.