The Brooklyn Rail

Since the eighteenth century, the literary aesthetic known as the Gothic has expanded to fit the terrors of every new age. It will take on any contemporary worry you can throw at it; naturally, an emergent branch of the genre is the ecogothic. Role-playing games have long been saturated with the Gothic, given its basis in surprise and uncertainty. And its musical counterpart, the post-punk development known as goth, expressed the brooding anxieties of its time—with a sound that musty velvet would make if it could sing. Founding member of The Cure, Lol Tolhurst, explained goth’s ethos as “about being in love with the melancholy beauty of existence.”

Harris Lahti’s debut, Foreclosure Gothic, is a goth song in novel form. It is full of murk, omens, melodrama, the lushness of carnality, and the fearsomeness of love’s darker impulses. It follows the fitful life arc of its protagonist Vic from young adulthood in the eighties to death some four decades later, years rife with the most frightening thing most of us will ever confront: the rationales we concoct to avoid our own failures.

True to the formal dictates of the Gothic, Lahti externalizes them in manifestations of foreboding and unease: the “friend” Vic fears has designs on his wife, the small child who refuses to talk, the sounds that emanate from the apartment of a vaguely sinister tenant, the garden whose sticky black dirt gives birth to misshapen behemoths—“onions the size of bowling balls, carrots bent at right angles”—and of course (this being upstate New York) legions of ominous ticks everywhere.

Vic meets Heather in Los Angeles where he is one of the multitudes of striving actors: he has so far landed a shampoo commercial and a small part in Days of Our Lives. But encountering the beautiful young drifter gives him the role he was made for: to love with abandon. Surrendering his onscreen dreams, he convinces her to return with him to his native New York, where he promises they can make a quick buck in the house-flipping business to finance their next chapter somewhere else. But, as with the menacing black dirt that surrounds the hinky house they buy to renovate but then find impossible to disengage from, entropy grips their roots. (In a moment of unalloyed horror—as opposed to the usual pregnant dread that pervades the book—the soil literally grabs their toddler son.) It is a metaphor, and a warning, for encroaching anomie, which sucks up the years if you don’t take care. A dream deferred and all that: “the auspicious future of renovating houses” is how Vic puts it in his sad self-delusion.

Lahti is a master of the portent, but not necessarily of follow-through. Often the novel acts like malfunctioning GPS, the kind that announces you’ve reached your destination when it has simply deposited you at the same cul-de-sac for the third time running. We have all been conditioned to read for the closure of ultimate meaning, but Lahti seems to believe that’s a cheap trap. I’m all for subverting the reader’s expectations. That’s the cool thing about postmodernism. Yet it can feel like a trick or even callowness when frustration becomes the norm, with pages of atmospheric setup and ghoulish symbolism simply left behind in the race to the next evocative scene. Their four-year-old—named Junior, emphasizing one of the novel’s points about the true horror of life being the inevitability of repeating our parents’ lives, since Vic’s father also renovated houses (as does the author himself)—doesn’t speak more than “nonsense language” until one truly terrifying moment. What does this event augur? We wait. It never reappears, because we’re on to the buildup for the appearance of the next unsettling auspice. The boy grows up to speak normally.

Junior stars in his own suggestively unfinished passage: now grown and married, with his own child, he too attempts to resist the glue trap of his patrimony. Whether or not he is able to extricate himself from the fatal seductions of the foreclosure business is a key turn in the novel’s slowly accreting meaning.

Assisting are two aspects of the book that buoy its general atmosphere of desolation (furthered by the inclusion of moody black-and-white photos). One is its beautifully sensual rendering of falling, and staying, in love. Another is its self-referential paean to the power of stories. They alone can make us new, Lahti seeks to demonstrate: even in the fourth decade of marriage, the act of telling each other stories makes Vic and Heather regain an intimacy that is “different with fervor. Younger. Someone else maybe.”

Foreclosure Gothic’s parade of eerie portents includes gravestones in, um, the one place you don’t want to find them; a piece of antique jewelry with strange powers; the baffling tenant, a garbage man whose impossible height seems to have grown from the same bizarrely fertile earth as the monstrous vegetables; and the discovery of proof that someone is spying on the intimacies of the hearth—but who is watching whom? None are ever “explained,” as Poe would have admired, but then the author of the Tell-Tale Heart did not stuff a single fiction with more than a dozen loose ends of foreboding.

Either this is a flaw, the author so keen to practice his rare skill at setting the normal to teeter just on the edge of the weird that he abandons most narrative precepts in favor of riding a hobbyhorse, or it’s all a masterpiece of subtlety. The fact that so many uncanny events never resolve into any difference in the flatline of Vic’s life might just be this book’s bid to bring a centuries-old form into the avant-garde.

Harris Lahti’s novel certainly feels of our peculiar moment. It is one in which everything, and everyone, is unmoored from what once was. At the same time it is all tethered to the anchor of the past by invisible rope. In this paradox of stagnation, we are the vultures who circle darkly over the death and decay of our own futures.