The Kills: An Interview with Richard House at The Millions

Over at The Millions, I've interviewed the author Richard House--some fascinating answers. Anyone who read my year's best list over at Electric Literature or my pick of the year for The Globe & Mail knows I loved Richard House's The Kills--my favorite fiction read of 2014. I also included it in my list of daring books over at FSG's site, where I wrote:

Richard House’s The Kills approximates the general idea of a thriller but the structure of four interlocking short novels makes the reader work to put the story together. (in a good way) The fact that one of the four novels is primarily thematically linked to the other three creates a unique kind of connectivity, and a situation where the entire shape of the story only locks into place on the very last page of the book. It's not that The Kills just subverts genre tropes-—it's not actually operating via those tropes, even in how characters enter and leave the narrative, and yet the ghostly outline of thriller expectations still do intercede on the reader's behalf.  The exquisite tension caused by this ghostly outline, brought to the text by the reader, held me transfixed and admiring as The Kills keeps becoming something different, and something different again.

There are few novels these days that read to me as if the writer understands some of the unique aspects of our modern condition. The Kills is one, Ledgard's Submergence was another, and The Corpse Exhibition by Hassan Blasim (translated by Jonathan Wright) a third. I believe we're in an era where a lot of what we've held to be universal or relevant in literature will begin to seem dated and nostalgic. But not these books.