The House of Dust

I received a free review copy of The House of Dust from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review - my sincerest thanks to both the author and the publisher. :)

This is Southern Gothic at its absolute finest. This book just creeps and oozes around you eventually swallowing you whole...much like some folks in the story. 

Mr. Broyles weaves the vivid tapestry for you to tread upon, unravels part of it out from under you, pulling a loose thread slowly until abruptly hog tying you with the loose strand and stuffing the rest into your mouth as a gag. By this point you are a hapless victim as the story consumes you while it unfolds towards its inexorable climax. The old is new, the new is old and we are just caught in the middle; the snake consumes its tail, history repeats. To quote a song from a much loved band out of Tennessee '10 Years' "Days pass, time flies, you don't realize, today you waste." 

He does such an excellent job of bringing these characters to life, building the impending sense of doom and destruction then shattering it with a flash of light, hope you think as you read and try to convince yourself, lying to yourself as you know the storm clouds are just boiling out of view. The darkness builds again and rushes through you sweeping you away longer each time until the next patch of light. About halfway through I realized I was caught up in the town's cycles. 

I grew up in the Deep South, and this quote from the book sums it up perfectly:
<i>"The South is a ghost, and so am I. Wandering the ways of the night, we return and return to find the place where we died. Walking circles, running cycles, never reaching beyond, never breaking free. Traveling through time orbiting a black star." </i>

I never grew up elsewhere but I can attest to the fact that it seems there is a near constant theme with folks growing up in the South. There is an endemic affecting  people who cannot escape the towns, cities, backwaters they were born in, their parents were born in or buried in, their great grandparents, and so on. Doesn't matter if you were born in a place sporting one traffic light, with barely patched, faded roads roiling with heat waves and maybe a Dollar General or born in a bustling metropolis into a family of means.

It's impossible to deny the cycle of the South something about it grips and holds trying to drag you down into a malaise where you talk about leaving but always put it off until tomorrow, until tomorrow finally comes and you join your ancestors in the same exact soil, once again the earth feasting on a blood it already knows, welcoming you to your actual home. 

Mr. Boyles takes these cycles, centuries old, and puts them into horrifying life, something almost tangible. This is a triumphal freshman debut.

I love a good horror novel, and a southern gothic one even more.  So when the chance to review this book came up, how could I resist.  And I was no disappointed in the least.  The has a way of gripping you almost straight away, and while it tells you what happened, you find yourself forgetting that and hoping that there may be a happy ending at the... well, end.  It gave me everything I could want from a horror, leaving me with an unsettling feeling that liked to plague my mind in the dead of night.  Brilliant.  I can not wait to read the authors next work!

This strange but atmospheric novel was my first taste of Southern Gothic and I found myself drawn into the story slowly but skilfully by author, Noah Broyles. The novel's brooding sense of darkness and evil is made even more ominous by the vivid and detailed settings  that absolutely drip with atmosphere. The author's use of language is sensuous and so perceptive the reader becomes immersed in this decaying small town with its long-buried evil presence just lurking in the background of every scene. Though the switching narrators can prove a little confusing at first, I quickly became accustomed to the sudden changes and found that it helped the novel achieve a kind of fragmented, dreamlike quality, or perhaps I should say, nightmarish! Perfect for horror fans looking for a beautifully written book.

“I got off the interstate to commit suicide”—these are the first words we get from Bradley Oswald Ellison. A man in full is revealed, haunted and on the run—every bit the gritty real life tragedy he writes about in Southern Gothic, the fictional magazine through which he seeks both literary and personal redemption. “After we had expressed concern about the quality of his latest publications in this magazine, he assured us that this latest project would restore our faith in him,”—this from Heather, his editor at Southern Gothic, whose words precede Bradley’s own. Heather is the inquisitor, the high priestess with the power to bestow the soothing calm of approval.

Bradley is a man on fire. Noah Broyles gives us his story in his 2021 novel The House of Dust, a precocious and expansive debut novel that dares to re-imagine an entire American literary sub-genre. And it all begins with Bradley trying to get his hands on a good story…

House of Dust brings Bradley to the town of Three Summers in rural Tennessee. The inhabitants are caught up in a strange cult with a dark history. They worship a fallen angel called Adamah that is buried deep beneath the town. The cult is lead by the Queen of Hearts. A position rather than an identity, the Queen of Hearts is a woman selected to lead the people further into this heart of darkness. She’s an outsider initially horrified but gradually pulled in.

What Adamah offers is peace: quietness of mind, relief from painful memories and existential dread—the sheer crassness of existence. Rather like Prozac. What Adamah demands in return is a peculiar form of human sacrifice: living internment.

Townsfolk bury each other alive to maintain the calm of Adamah—a very curious choice. Extrapolating, if I may, we can say with definitude that we find ultimate calm only in death—that is, only when we’re in the ground. Adamah, the fallen angel, shares a root word with our biblical first man, Adam—adam is Hebrew for dust and adamah for soil, dirt: soil, that in which we bury the dead as well as from which springs new life. Dust, the byproduct of organic matter, and soil, the origin and destination of human life, intermingle throughout the novel. I consider the connections between dirt and sleep—the sandman of popular lore. Sleep and death share a long literary relationship. Perhaps that is why most of the cults’ members who are put into the ground still breathing go passively. In fact, the ones that are saved express dismay.

Bradley is buried alive in a sense. His career, his relationships, his family: all dead matter. He expresses his suicidal intentions as casually as a weatherman reporting rain. Bradley himself doesn’t seem to know whether he is alive or dead.  His fiancée Jennifer sees the world through lenses shaded dark, tinged by addiction. There is a listlessness to her: something beyond the recoil from a world that has bitten her. She’s a shade and fading fast, so much so that she nearly drops out of the story (as Bradley allowed her to drop out of his life) and is replaced by Missy Holiday.

Two separate timelines dominate House of Dust. Missy moves to Three Summers in the 60s, but Broyles lays out her narrative in parallel to Bradley’s, breaking both into pieces, giving the sensation that they are linked together.

Missy and Bradley elide so much, it’s easy for the reader to lose track and forget they’re two generations apart. The narrative relentlessly presses them together; I draw your attention to Inkshares’ book description—“Bradley Ellison and Missy Holiday retreat from the world on a desolate plantation…” Even the novel’s meta-text is complicit in this sleight of hand. It’s as though the book itself wants you to think they are a pair.

Missy, of course, is a Queen of Hearts, as Jennifer is destined to be as well. There is a lot of overlap in these characters: both are disturbed at what they see, both forcibly have the sheriff buried, both have a dark past but find peace (I presume) in the embrace of Adamah.

However, Bradley changes the narrative—Missy shoots and buries Walt (her lover), but Bradley shoots Jennifer. He then completes his article and shoots himself. The cycle, it seems, is broken. But questions remain: primarily, of course, how to read Bradley’s “House of Dust” against Broyles’ House of Dust. We have three levels of text to deal with: Broyles’ narrative, Bradley’s article (snippets of which preface each chapter) and Heather’s preface.

Writing itself comes to take center stage. Sorrel, the sheriff, warns Bradley that his article will only serve as a monument to Adamah and bring strangers into its grasp. Those who resist the pull of Adamah are worked on in curious ways, their minds distorted until they become builders. How better to resist that which lies beneath than to build up? However, their resistance is transmuted into support; all inlets of individuality in Three Summers find their way back to Adamah.

The town mine is one such project, the backbone of Three Summers’ financial survival. Yet what could be more to Adamah’s liking than a large-scale commercial project dedicated to exhuming that which is buried deep below? Like one who is sexually repressed and finds indirect expressions of desire manifesting in everything they touch, Adamah is the ultimate subject all things find their way back to. Like Missy who tries to leave town by driving straight only to find herself after some minutes arriving right back in Three Summers, there is no escaping the orbit of this buried angel.

Sorrel warns Bradley that his article will have the effect of bringing more people into this orbit—that Adamah wants him to write it. However, the sands have changed beneath their feet. Sorrel himself is the first town sheriff to stand in opposition to Adamah. And Bradley’s article may indeed stand as a monument, but not a built one: a monument of language. It’s quite curious—wouldn’t the real Queen of Hearts, then, be Heather, his editor at Southern Gothic? The real cult would be the magazine’s its readership, hungry for next gore soaked story. What is Mr. Broyles trying to say?

Feeble attempts at jest aside, House of Dust is a crackshot piece of writing. It hinges on a finely wrought balance between the preternatural and the plausible deniability that comes with mental illness. The mystery of what, if anything, Adamah actually is, is wisely left open.

Bradley is a ramshackle lead to stake such an ambitious novel on, but the momentum of his continual fall into oblivion keeps House of Dust spiraling forward. As does Missy’s slow climb out of one darkness and into another. Better to rule as a Queen of Hearts than serve as a slave in a sex club. Hard to argue with that.

Part of the charm of Broyles’ writing is its tendency to bleed genres into the “southern gothic” header in a way that enhances rather than confuses the direction of the novel. That isn’t easy to pull off. Bradley, for instance, is a far cry from, say, O’Connor’s characters, many of which begin ostensibly well put together only to suffer a lapse of some kind. Bradley is already lapsed; he is lapse incarnate. We learn near the end that his father was responsible for the deaths of several men. This original sin passed down from the father haunts him. It’s the root of his literary preoccupation with murderers. Behind the pen, there is always trauma. I won’t inquire on Broyle’s behalf. Bradley indeed has something of the broken detective from film noir. This is just one of the cards in the deck that is House of Dust.

Broyles’ writing is tense—there is an unremitting heaviness in how the narrative unfolds. The way the townsfolk are evacuated of subjectivity and rendered, like corpses, with abstract details is the scaffolding which holds the weight of the novel’s revelations.

I pick a passage at random: “Like disenchanted worshipers, the people rose to their feet. Their faces seemed to sag, burdened with weariness. They flashed glances at one another and gathered their plaids and denims around tighter. For a moment, Brad felt it too: a vicious chill seeping up from the ground. Warping the air. Seeming to stretch the sheriff’s voice as he repeated his command: ‘Go.’”

The Faulkneresque cadence is marvelous. (Note the syntactical breaks in the final sentences.) Abstractions are treated like objects as the human subjects are treated with abstraction. This is literally a sea of faces, a whole disturbed town gawking at an unwanted and doomed outsider.

This is great stuff.

House of Dust is not without its flaws—few novels are. I’m obliged to report a rigidness that creeps into the writing on occasion. The text renders its effect so convincingly, the game is played out to exhaustion. A touch of levity would do much to offset the relentless weight of the narrative. How much more tragic would Bradley’s fall have been if he actually believed at some point that he and Jennifer could escape and live happily? But Bradley seems destined for damnation and duly finds it.

But then, we’re told from the outset what Bradley’s fate is. There isn’t a lot of guesswork left to the reader. Perhaps my only caveat is House of Dust accomplishes what it does with aplomb, but it may not be, proverbially, everyone’s cup of tea.

Still, the novel is highly commended and, though I make it a point never to look forward to things, I heartily look forward to what Noah Broyles writes next. As should you all.