Foreclosure Gothic

Haunted House Book Club :: March 2026

Welcome to the Haunted House Book Club! Each month in 2026 will begin with a post and a chat thread about a haunted house book to spark the discussion. Toward the end of the month I'll do a live video (sometimes with the author) where you can ask questions via chat.

Book Club Info for March / April

» Chime in on the Foreclosure Gothic chat thread

» Live video discussion with Nathan Holic: Monday March 30 at 7PM EST

» Comments to this post are disabled because the discussion is happening in a chat thread.

» Chat threads and live video access is for subscribers only, but it’s free to subscribe!

» April’s book club pick: Model Home by Rivers Solomon

» Discussion post + chat thread opens on April 6

» Live video discussion with kerina lovejoy on Monday 4/27 at 7PM EST

» Check my about page for the most recent info, live video dates, etc.

NOTE: keep in mind the thoughts below are for people who have read the book. That said, the first section of this particular post is pretty much spoiler-free. It’s kind of hard to spoil this book, I think. I’ll mark where the spoilers begin in all caps.

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Thougts on Foreclosure Gothic: There’s no time for hauntings when there’s money to be made.

Quotes derived from first edition hardcover, Astra House, 2025

The first time I finished reading this book, I was frustrated. Despite the immersive prose that made the act of reading it skate by like a pleasant, weird dream, I wondered, What was the point of all that? I had to sit with these feelings for a minute to sort them out and I eventually came around to appreciating the novel much more than I anticipated. The focus of this “review” will be on that journey from frustration to appreciation, which in part requires some synopsizing.

In the first chapter we get a kind of meetcute between Vic and Heather in Hollywood. Aspiring actor Vic lands a recurring role on a soap opera, then Heather vanishes without saying goodbye. By the second chapter Vic and Heather are married. Heather is pregnant and they’ve moved back near their hometowns in upstate NY. Vic’s career has stalled, so he buys a foreclosed home with the hopes of flipping it and earning enough money to move back out west. The house is historical, dating back to the Revolutionary War. The previous owners clearly died there, as did a mother and son whose ancient gravestones Vic finds in the basement. By chapter three they’re living in the old house and the expected strange occurrences of the genre begin. It seems like we’re about to settle into a traditional haunted house story. We think we’ll learn more about the gravestones and the house’s past. But that does not happen. This is where the novel starts making choices that initially made me mad upon finishing the book, because they seemed to amount to nothing.

The chapters keep jump-cutting, farther and farther into the future. The novel asks the reader to fill in the gaps via key details and implication. Each chapter operates more like a short story without clear resolution. Increasing tensions and dread build to the discovery of something strange –– the gravestones in the basement, then mysterious peepholes left by a previous owner –– only for that strange thing to be forgotten by the next chapter, and rarely if ever referenced again. Hence the initial frustration. The strange discoveries that usually accumulate into story are disconnected and fleeting.

I should say: there is a central focus to this novel that flows from beginning to end. Much like last month’s book, Foreclosure Gothic is about generational cycles, fathers and sons. In this case, when Vic needs money to start a family, he gives up acting and falls back on the house-flipping trade his dad trained him for. He grows into a workaholic, just like his old man, and justifies that all this work he’s putting in is for the good of his son, who he expects to give up his own creative dreams and follow in the family trade. By novel’s end the cycle is complete. It’s a pretty straightforward story around which these one-off strange events swirl. What bothered me was not knowing what to make of those strange events. Why does this haunted house/horror/gothic/whatever-it-is book never get that aspect of the story off the ground?

In retrospect, I’ve come to think the chapters function more like the photographs that appear throughout the book. Each chapter is a snapshot in time. Like a photograph, there is no clear resolution or inherent meaning revealed by the limited amount that we see –– or in the case of a novel, what we read. And Lahti gives us a ton of strange images, no matter the mundanity of the situation –– “cauliflower steams like a boiled brain” (52) at the family’s dinner table, for example. When we’re not focused on Vic or Heather’s interiority, the novel trades in these smooth and strange surface-level details and events that may create tension or an eerie mood, but never amount to anything plot-wise. The night of the dinner with the cauliflower (and other overlarge veggies from the house’s freakishly fecund garden) is not a typical one. Vic and Heather’s son speaks for the first time, at length and with a vocabulary and knowledge beyond his age on the topic of the necklace Heather found in the garden soil. But by the next chapter, nothing is strange about the son. The necklace and its possible origins are forgotten.

I thought about these photo-novel parallels enough to pull out a copy of Barthes’ Camera Lucida¹ and revisit his ideas about the two elements that make up a photograph from the viewer’s perspective. There’s the studium, which is the viewer’s willing cultural engagement with the “the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions” we see in a photo. This translates to how readers willingly follow a traditional fictional narrative –– reading legible characters as they move through plot. The second element is the punctum, which “rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces” the viewer. It disturbs the studium. Likewise, for the reader of Foreclosure Gothic, each chapter has a moment of rupture with reality, a brush with the supernatural or an encounter with the uncanny –– the gravestones, the peepholes, the son’s weird speech –– that creates this same punctum effect. In the novel these create a sense of mystery/dread/excitement that disrupt the narrative flow and capture our attention. But if the chapters are like photos and each “punctum” is removed from plot, not connecting or relating at all from chapter to chapter, never resolving at the end, then the photo-novel parallels seem to end here. An accumulation of details is not a story, it’s vibes. That was my initial fear and annoyance with the novel.

Still, I felt like something was there. Between the actual photos that punctuate the novel and the work being asked of the reader to connect dots between chapters, not to mention the cheeky connection that the type-A (guilty as charged!) reader might make between Vic’s character and the book jacket author bio that says Lahti paints and renovates houses. And even though I think blurbs are kind of BS, I definitely took note of the endorsements from serious literary artists –– Lynne Tillman and Patrick Cottrell? Swoon! It all smacked of intention, and I was pretty sure I was the one missing something here.

So what to make of all those punctums, disturbances, all the weirdness, all those abandoned haunted house tropes? It was the “gothic” in the title, after all, that drew me to the book. So what makes this novel gothic? After sitting with my frustrations for a while, I realized that this book, consciously or not, is operating from a definition of the gothic that is central to my own thinking and creative work. A definition grounded in the literary scholarship of Teresa Goddu, who writes

…the gothic tells of the historical horrors that make national identity possible yet must be repressed in order to sustain it.²

The gothic haunting is usually the site of political or social critique. It’s the return of the repressed come to disturb the status quo. But in Foreclosure Gothic, the gothic never fully breaks through. The past is so abhorrent that the entire novel is written in present tense.

In the case of Vic’s first house-flipping venture, when he encounters the gravestones in the basement and calls his dad wondering what to do about it, his dad’s advice is: “You just heap the dirt back over and get that house sold.” (8) This is the core logic that informs and connects each chapter: bury the past and get paid. Chapter after chapter, the gothic is in a losing battle against repression.

The emergence and disappearance of haunting elements and horror tropes form their own smaller cycles amid the larger generational one, in which the norm is the white hetero family unit, led by the patriarch, enmeshed in the game of capitalist wealth accumulation. There is no one haunted house in the book, but many, and Vic flips them all for profit, never looking back. That each gothic cycle gets stalled is what unifies them, each gothic scenario lost to the churn of capitalism as Vic powers through life, trapped in his own generational cycle of exploitation, and preparing to pass it all on to his son.

In the end, Foreclosure Gothic subverts all the horror tropes in order to say: There’s no time for hauntings when there’s money to be made.

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Some questions for book club

Why does Vic ultimately decide to stay flipping houses? The logic seems magical, toward the end of chapter 2 or 3… it overlaps with the part where Heather’s baby seems to be several months overdue. Is that even a realistic amount of time? In the “Black Dirt” chapter he tells the old women walking by he fell in love with the house… but how? Why?

This book also uses names to signal kind of unreality, or reality adjscent, maybe even at times fairy-tale-like, narrative. Besides Vic and Heather, the characters are Junior, Mother in Law, the garbageman. The old women who watch him mow the lawn are compared to witches. Anyone else reading this as a kind of fable or fairy tale?

What do you think about the use of photos in the novel?

What was up with including the vacation to Mexico in the chapter called “Through the Wall”? Relatedly, migrant houses often loom in the background of the landscape. Vic’s laborers are often referred to as Mexicans, like Elvis and Jesus later in the book. What is the broader role of Mexican-ness” in the novel? I have thoughts but what are yours?

On page 46 Vic muses about “The way our lives barrel into unknowable futures, barely giving us time to react.” I feel like this is a key theme that haunts Vic throughout the long scope of the book, which basically covers his whole adult life. I think a lot of groundwork is laid in the first chapter when we learn Vic is incapable of coming up with a backstory, whereas Heather is more obsessed with histories and how core memories or events shape who people are. Vic seems to be void of a personality. As an actor he logs gestures in his mental archive for future characters. But long after his acting career his interaction with people are described as if he’s acting. So what is Vic’s deal? And same goes for Heather, who seems to be his opposite.

Despite, in my opinion, the book’s awesome book cover, did you find the cover to be, for lack of a better word, misleading? General book cover thoughts also welcome.

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Thanks for reading! I’m looking forward to your thoughts in the chat, which will open up as soon as I sit down at the computer today or tomorrow. As usual, bring up anything you want. It doesn’t have to be related to any of my questions/thoughts above.

And join me and my incredibly smart, horror-loving friend, Nathan Holic, for a live video discussion of Foreclosure Gothic on Monday March 30 at 7pm EST.

1. Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, FSG, 2010. Quotes from pages 26-7.

2. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation, Teresa A. Goddu, Columbia University Press, 1997, p. 10.