REVIEW: Foreclosure Gothic by Harris Lahti

On sorrow houses and the slippery American Dream

…there’s only one season under capitalism

spring

there’s only one season under capitalism

Spring

—From “Spring” by Nanna Storr-Hansen, Paris Review, Summer 2025

Harris Lahti’s debut novel, Foreclosure Gothic, is Gothic, indeed, with a full cast of menacing characters drifting through an ominous and eerie American landscape. Disturbing pasts haunt the decaying present, and a stifled family in a house (or in this case, in many houses), serve as metaphors for all the subtle (and not so subtle) horrors of the collapsing American Dream.

The book is getting praise everywhere, and it’s worthy of the hype. It’s an immersive read with a thrumming pace and mesmerizing prose that pulls heavily from Lahti’s own life. His sentences are harmonic and masterful; his clauses build beautifully toward his desired (often ominous) moods and meanings. Here, one sentence as its own paragraph: “Vic’s exhaustion follows him down the road through the onion fields, spreading a dreamy weirdness over everything while he drives, undulating the corrugated black dirt, draining the blue from the sky.”

Beyond his debut novel, Harris is a house painter, the fiction editor at the popular lit mag Fence, and a co-founder of the indie publishing house Cash4Gold Books, alongside fellow novelist and wordsmith, Jon Lindsey.

Foreclosure Gothic is also a modern love story. It follows the Greeners, a couple with big dreams who meet on the beach in LA, then move home to the reality of flipping foreclosed houses in Upstate, New York. In LA, Vic works as a bit-part soap actor who practices his craft by stealing beachgoers’ mannerisms. Heather is an actress, too. She recently left an artist troupe and slips in and out of people’s lives and homes, including Vic’s, with a freedom that enthralls Vic, but also drives him to a kind of blank madness.

Heather gets pregnant and the couple moves back East into Heather’s unwelcoming mother’s house. Vic believes he’ll just flip a foreclosed house or two, then move the family back to LA in time for the next pilot season. But this dream (whether American or pipe) also forecloses on itself, and the Greeners’ path forward narrows to a dark, single lane Upstate. When their child, Jr., is born, Vic and Heather are settled into their hometown and living in their first foreclosure. They put their roots down in the black soil alongside the enormous onions and carrots and cauliflower that grow there in pale abundance. The deformed vegetables sell alright at the farmer’s market and give the family sustenance, but not a lot, and no one’s too thrilled about it.

Vic is making a living refurbishing family homes they bought “for a prayer” at auction. You’ve got to “see the house behind the house,” he says, without much care as to how the house got to auction in the first place. (That is, beyond selling, hiding, or burning anything that might comprise their flip.) But the American Dream is slippery, you know? It’s hard for anyone to hold on to, and people leave behind all sorts of detritus on their way down. Talismans. Omens. Artifacts. Signs. Lahti’s smart, creepy debut is asking: What happens if you ignore the signs?

In Foreclosure Gothic, answers are hard to come by. Recollections and retellings provide wisps of answers, like steam off the brain-sized cauliflowers the Greeners eat for dinner, but then they’re gone. The mundane, the holy, and the salacious are piled together and quickly hauled off to the dump by an unsentimental dad in paint-splattered pants. Who left all these things? What horrors might have occurred? Nothing resolves. Whole lives are reduced to weight and crushed into nothing as Vic acquires more and more.

An early chapter of the book is spent with Vic and Heather’s first tenants, the seven-foot-tall garbageman and his ever-present, ever-pregnant wife. After the garbageman relapses and loses his job, he works with Vic, who is always on the hunt for cheap labor. Vic hopes to keep him from other jobs until they don’t need him anymore, and Heather can’t but agree when she sees the progress the men are making. She describes the garbageman:

Shirtless and grunting, he lumbers across the sun-dappled yard

with another cache of stones in his bulging, tattooed arms… his reddish

skin slimy looking and oddly hairless in the midmorning light. Like a

skinned circus goat inked in elusive words and pictures…

That shit really stuck with me. The way the Greeners see him and treat him like an animal to be used for their gain and disposal. They treat everyone and everything like that. The garbageman and his wife linger on long after they leave the book’s pages for reasons unknown. Like the other families who float in and out of chapters, they stay awhile and then they’re gone. Questions plague the reader—Will they come back? Where did they go? What happened to them?— but the machinery of time and capitalism only move in one direction, and everything gets lost in the crush. The novel’s forward momentum is thus an essential marriage of content and form; it both reinforces the novel’s themes and drives its quiet horror.

Vic brings to mind Thérnardier, the innkeeper and thief in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, another novel dealing with national collapse and its moral and material consequences. The reader is introduced to him in the night, after Waterloo, picking over dead soldiers’ bodies on the battlefield and stealing their valuables. He claims to need to do this for his ever-growing expenses: his wife and children and their security. Not to mention his newly acquired street urchin. But it’s clear that Thérnardier is unscrupulous, a crook. A predator. And then there’s Vic. He ignores an old woman dying because he doesn’t want to be bothered; he covers up horrific sex crimes and brushes off potential incest because he doesn’t want to be bothered; he ignores his family’s wishes and desires, buries a baby’s grave and his best friend’s tortured confession. Even his own stroke won’t bother him. He has hard work to do, money to make, houses to buy dirt cheap. And he knows how it looks. He says, “It’s not personal. It’s just business.” The consequences of Vic’s stubborn lurching follow him right up to his very end and ask: isn’t he a predator, too? Aren’t we? And will what goes unanswered follow us around like the crows and vultures that dot the novel?

The Greeners make an alright living for themselves, but there’s an Adam Curtis, Lynchian level of absurdity to Vic and Heather’s love story unfolding amid their scavenging of haunted houses. At one point the dump guy bangs out a holy dirge on an abandoned church organ, and it’s almost romantic. Relatable, even. Still, it’s worth remembering that in Les Misérables, it’s not the poor and persecuted who are truly miserable, but those who profit off their suffering. And no matter how enticing or lucrative the perpetual churn of capitalism may be, perhaps it’s worth considering whether the constant greening of devastated pastures only fertilizes their ruin.

In Japan, there’s a term for a house where something terrible has happened: Jiko Bukken. It means ‘stigmatized property.’ People avoid them and they’re generally a hard sell, but now, as their housing markets tighten, Japanese realtors are looking at Jiko Bukken to find “the house behind the house,” as it were. I read an article about it after finishing Foreclosure Gothic, and I couldn’t get the book and its implications out of my mind. I wondered about the homes lost to sorrow, violence, and foreclosure in America. Aren’t they Jiko Bukken, too? I try to conjure fleets of Japanese dads pulling up outside of sorrow houses all over the country, pulling up the driveway of a home that’s known great pain in their tiny trucks and thinking, Wow. A nice coat of paint would work wonders.