At the start of July, Boris Johnson was revealed to be looking into a policy to create 50-year mortgages intended to be paid back by the applicants' children. So that's what came to mind as I began reading Andrew J. Stone's All Hail the House Gods, a novella in which the inhabitants of a tent city are forced to constantly produce children to sacrifice to hungry houses.
From the off this concept is both inventive and timely (somehow even more the latter than it was four years ago) and it's one that allows the author to blend moral drama with some truly memorable imagery. Yet this firm foundation doesn't mean the structure proper is without cracks.
The narrative follows two strands. Punctuated by glimpses into a scene in which our protagonist stands on the bridge sacrifices must cross to be consumed by the House Gods, the main story follows the steps that led him to that point. As both he and his wife, Katie, begin to seek ways to break out of the cycle of endless reproduction and death, we know he is getting closer to that climactic moment - a well-trodden narrative device, but an effective one.
Though this story is clearly deeply metaphorical, the characterisation stops it from tipping over into being just a moralistic fable. While Kate, on witnessing the sacrifice of the couples' first child, becomes committed to resisting the House Gods and the 'Coupling Council' that ensure a constant supply of child victims, he is at first confused and unsettled by her response, having internalised the beliefs of the society in which he was raised. Even when he does begin to seek alternatives, he opts for a very different mode of action, which drives a lot of the interpersonal tension that fleshes the novella out beyond simple didactism. Meanwhile, some clunky exposition and worldbuilding with a lot of Capitalised Nouns can edge on the YA dystopia but it seems that, like a gothic house, the artifice is the point - combined with the surrealistic imagery, the aim is to provoke thought, not to create a cohesive fantasy world.
The last thing I'll mention is how difficult some of the subject matter here can be. That shouldn't come as any surprise given the themes of reproductive control, but it can still get pretty gruesome. Be aware that there are discussions of self-performed abortion and sex between children. These latter are not graphic - rather they are described in a mixture of childish euphemism and agricultural or industrial metaphor, language that barely changes when describing sex between adults. This is one of the most disturbing things about the novella, a telling glimpse into a society that views every person as just a procreator, and children just as more grist for the mill.
As I said at the start of this review, a solid foundation doesn't prevent the building having its flaws. Certainly there were unsatisfying elements as I read it - understated prose that works admirably when demonstrating the protagonist's dull, helpless acceptance of the monstrous society around him, but less so when showing his awe at the fantastical elements of the story; the only very brief discussion of those who collaborate with such oppression not out of fear, but out of comfort. Yet the more I look back on this book, the less any flaws stand out against the whole - and the whole is an effectively unsettling and thought-provoking work of horror. I've certainly not been able to take my mind off of it since I read it.
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