“I am Rose House, entire, and have never been anything else. I am not lonely. I do not wish to be a companion of elsewheres.”
This was so atmospheric and a pleasure to read, even though I’m pretty sure I didn’t understand half of what was going on.
The main conceit here is that this is a sci-fi take on a haunted house, where the haunt is an A.I. that IS the house, not that inhabits the house or was installed there, but is in every molecule. The house belonged to a real creep, though a famous one, named Basit Deniau, and he has left it to his former protégé, a woman named Selene, who is only allowed in the house once a year for a period of days. Deniau has been dead a year when the A.I. makes a mandatory reporting call to the local police precinct to report a body, and the body does not belong to the only person allowed to enter the house.
Don’t go into this expecting any sort of whodunnit, the book doesn’t care about that. What it does care about doing is creeping you out with the eerie nature of technology and how just its sheer existence makes questioning everything else about reality a slippery slope.
I was left mostly unsatisfied by this novella, but that’s the way the author wants it, I think. And the atmosphere is so thick it nearly makes up for any answers you don’t get.
Chipping Away at Mt. TBR, Spooky Season Edition —Book 2/31