The House in November

by Keith Laumer

First edition in VG+ condition. The book has a slight spine lean and shelf wear at the base of the spine. The dust jacket is tanned and is dust soiled at the rear panel. DJ art by Richard Powers.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

117 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

John Keith Laumer was an American science fiction author. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, he was an officer in the U.S. Air Force and a U.S. diplomat. His brother March Laumer was also a writer, known for his adult reinterpretations of the Land of Oz (also mentioned in Keith's The Other Side of Time).

Keith Laumer (aka J.K Laumer, J. Keith Laumer) is best known for his Bolo stories and his satirical Retief series. The former chronicles the evolution of juggernaut-sized tanks that eventually become self-aware through the constant improvement resulting from centuries of intermittent warfare against various alien races. The latter deals with the adventures of a cynical spacefaring diplomat who constantly has to overcome the red-tape-infused failures of people with names like Ambassador Grossblunder. The Retief stories were greatly influenced by Laumer's earlier career in the United States Foreign Service. In an interview with Paul Walker of Luna Monthly, Laumer states "I had no shortage of iniquitous memories of the Foreign Service."

Four of his shorter works received Hugo or Nebula Award nominations (one of them, "In the Queue", received nominations for both) and his novel A Plague of Demons was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1966.

During the peak years of 1959–1971, Laumer was a prolific science fiction writer, with his novels tending to follow one of two patterns: fast-paced, straight adventures in time and space, with an emphasis on lone-wolf, latent superman protagonists, self-sacrifice and transcendence or, broad comedies, sometimes of the over-the-top variety.

In 1971, Laumer suffered a stroke while working on the novel The Ultimax Man. As a result, he was unable to write for a few years. As he explained in an interview with Charles Platt published in The Dream Makers (1987), he refused to accept the doctors' diagnosis. He came up with an alternative explanation and developed an alternative (and very painful) treatment program. Although he was unable to write in the early 1970s, he had a number of books which were in the pipeline at the time of the stroke published during that time.

In the mid-1970s, Laumer partially recovered from the stroke and resumed writing. However, the quality of his work suffered and his career declined (Piers Anthony, How Precious Was That While, 2002). In later years Laumer also reused scenarios and characters from his earlier works to create "new" books, which some critics felt was to their detriment:

Alas, Retief to the Rescue doesn't seem so much like a new Retief novel, but a kind of Cuisnart mélange of past books.

-- Somtow Sucharitkul (Washington Post, Mar 27, 1983. p. BW11)

His Bolo creations were popular enough that other authors have written standalone science-fiction novels about them.

Laumer was also a model airplane enthusiast, and published two dozen designs between 1956 and 1962 in the U.S. magazines Air Trails, Model Airplane News and Flying Models, as well as the British magazine Aero Modeler. He published one book on the subject, How to Design and Build Flying Models in 1960. His later designs were mostly gas-powered free flight planes, and had a whimsical charm with names to match, like the "Twin Lizzie" and the "Lulla-Bi". His designs are still being revisited, reinvented and built today.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 2 out of 5]

The House in November was serialized in three installments in If magazine's October-December issues in 1969 with the odd title The Seeds of Gonyl. Putnam published it in hardback the following year as The House in November, which I always thought was Laumer's best title, and Berkley released a mass market version the following year with the same Richard Powers cover. It's a Rip van Winkle story of a man who awakes to find several months have passed and he's seemingly in a whole different world. His teen-aged daughter is gone, and his wife denies she ever existed. Instead of owning an engineering company, he's a laborer constructing a mysterious tower, and the townspeople are zombies like extras in Invasion from Mars. The world itself has gone very strange, with a joint Russian-U.S. army worried about a Chinese invasion. It's an interesting set-up, but kind of falls apart. His quest to sort it all out suffers with dated attitudes and situations, it has a kind of weak conclusion, and to top it off he has an awkward and unhealthy and unnecessary and unfortunate affair with his daughter's best friend.

[Philip · Rating 2 out of 5]

So checking up on Goodreads, it turns out I've probably read more Laumer than almost any other writer (yikes!), largely based of my love for his one truly great story, Dinosaur Beach, and the fact that our huge used bookstore usually has a stack of his slim paperbacks selling for well under a buck apiece. That said, I've also sworn off of him any number of times, since nothing else ever came close to measuring up to Dinosaur. But then I recently saw this on the shelf and in hardcover, which I've NEVER seen before (probably because most of his stories never deserved a decent hardcover run); and so I checked GR and sure enough this was written just before Laumer's debilitating 1971 stroke and also just before Dinosaur, and so figured "how bad can it be for $1.99?"

Well, the answer is "still pretty bad." It reads like Laumer spent more time plotting it out than actually writing it, and then bypassed any editing to send it straight off to his publisher, so that we get frequent sentences like:

"His injured arm ached with a deep implacable ache."

"The door swung back to reveal a small room lined with shelves lined with Mason jars."

…and then again:

"Mallory's shoulder ached with a vast, throbbing ache."

Story itself isn't completely terrible, but as usual everyone involved is more caricature than character, (fat, stupid, bucktoothed, redneck, buxom, etc.). And speaking of, there's one particularly creepy note when he almost hooks up with his teenage daughter's best friend, ("I'm nineteen, Jeff. I'm a woman. Certainly Lori's my friend, but that doesn't…doesn't…").

Anyway, after just finishing Adrian Tchaikovsky's outstanding Alien Clay and a run of other really good books, I said I was ready for something stupid — so mission accomplished.

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 2 out of 5]

review of
Keith Laumer's The House in November
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 31, 2015

I wrote a review of a Laumer bk yesterday ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7... ). That was about all I got done yesterday. Not a good day. Today's not much better, the only slightly substantial thing I've done today is take apart an accordion, now I know a little more about accordions, maybe I'll take my last few dollars & buy some carpenter's glue so I can try to fix it. Who cares, right? Get to the fucking bk review, right?!

This is another hack work by a hack writer who had some 'success' a few yrs before this bk came out w/ his Invaders wch was made into a tv series. I reckon he was trying to milk the last pennies out of the-things-from-outer-space-that-imitate-humans-who're-gonna-kill-us-all type story b/c that's what this is.

"There was a sharp thwack! of the mechanism, the stiff jolt of the recoil. Six inches of bright steel stood quivering against the bright-patterned chest. Mallory realized quite suddenly that the "shirt" was not a garment; it was part of the not-man's body, molded with it. . . ." - p 34

Mallory's trying to figure out what's going on, he's got amnesia, has the army fought the invaders?

"A hundred yards from his starting point, a burned out tank rested on its side in the ditch. So the army had fought—and lost. He plodded on, head down against the chill wind, headed north into the dark countryside." - p 36

It's ambiguous, there're a multiplicity of interpretations:

""There's been a war," the elderly man said cooly. "A short war—one which the United States failed to win. The country has been invaded. We're under occupation by Soviet troops."" - p 40

Is it the Russians? The Chinese? Devils? Aliens? Disease?

""Satan's clever," Brother Jack said. "Oh, I underestimated him. I'll confess to you that for years I was skeptical in my heart. I spoke the word of God, but in my private thoughts I was an unbeliever. That's why He loosed Satan on the world, you see, I admit it. I'm the guilty one!"" - p 75

""No . . . invade is not the correct word," the old man said. "Your planet is not occupied; it's infected. They're not invaders; they're a disease."" - p 94

The bk's 'dated' in a way that caught me off-guard:

""Then one day I caught a faint echo from deep space. I monitored it, watched it grow until there was no longer any doubt: A Mone space pod was approaching, had in fact passed the orbit of Pluto, and was falling sunward with gradually increasing velocity. In short, the day long-dreaded was approaching. the Mone was here.["]" - p 98

This casual mention of Pluto was made during the time Pluto was considered to be a planet. I imagine that any references to it these days wd be subtly different. This gives me an excuse to quote at length from NASA's website:

"Discovered in 1930, Pluto was long considered our solar system's ninth planet. But after the discovery of similar intriguing worlds deeper in the distant Kuiper Belt, icy Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet. This new class of worlds may offer some of the best evidence about the origins of our solar system.

10 Need-to-Know Things About Pluto:

1. If the sun were as tall as a typical front door, Earth would be the size of a nickel and dwarf planet Pluto would be about the size of the head of a pin.
2. Pluto orbits our sun, a star, at an average distance of 3.7 billion miles (5.9 billion kilometers) or 39.5 AU.
3. One day on Pluto takes about 153 hours. That's the time it takes for Pluto to rotate or spin once. Pluto makes a complete orbit around the sun (a year in Plutonian time) in about 248 Earth years.
4. It is thought that Pluto has a rocky core surrounded by a mantle of water ice with other ices coating its surface.
5. Pluto has five known moons. Pluto is sometimes called a double-planet system due to the fact that its moon Charon is quite large and orbits close to its parent planet.
6. There are no known rings around Pluto.
7. Pluto has a thin, tenuous atmosphere that expands when it comes closer to the sun and collapses as it moves farther away -- similar to a comet.
8. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is the first mission sent to encounter the Pluto-system and other members of the Kuiper Belt.
9. Scientists do not think Pluto can support life as we know it. Although, some scientists believe it is possible Pluto could possess a hidden ocean under its surface.
10. Pluto was considered a planet from 1930, when it was first discovered, until 2006. The discovery of similar-sized worlds deeper in the distant Kuiper Belt sparked a debate which resulted in a new official definition of a planet. The new definition did not include Pluto." - https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/...

Wasn't that fun? That little bit of quoting from NASA is the only thing that even makes this shitty little review worth writing. Imagine if I were writing this review under the conditions described in the next The House in November quote:

""But—Jeff Mallory—there is no human race to save. Surely you know! The first act of the Mone pod on picking a breeding site is to broadcast a killing gas which wipes the planet clean of organic life except in the protected area of the nest. The people of your city of Beatrice live—as mindless slaves of the Mone. All the rest, Jeff Mallory, are dead!"" - p 111

Some people are such downers, always looking on the negative side. But when the chips are down, there's nothing like a little mind-melding to save the day:

"Awareness of a woman's self-picture flooded into his mind; all the memories and complexities of a full human existence were comprehended in a single polyordinal gestalt. For a fractional instant he sensed her startlement at the strange touch invading her identity, the beginning of a flash of atavistic fear; then he had shunted aside her feeble ego-assertion reflex, adding the computational and conceptualizing circuitry of her mind to the Mallory/Strang duality." - p 146

Whatever. I'm being cynical here but Laumer's bk is better than my review of it so I deserve more criticism than he does. I enjoyed it, it served its purpose for today, escapism n'at.

[Redsteve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starts out with a decent premise and has a few interesting twists, but is VERY mid-20th Century (non-hard) SciFi. While Laumer is an entertaining author, his characters are not deep; after reading a few of his books, you find that everyone fits into one of a few stereotypes. Low 3 stars.

[Jason Thompson · Rating 1 out of 5]

A deservedly forgotten short alien invasion novella. The book begins in Twilight Zone mode, with the narrator waking up to find his family and neighbors transformed into brainwashed zombies serving alien invaders. After escaping the town, the hero roams the nearby countryside where he runs into a variety of totally unhelpful people (religious fanatics, inept soldiers, rednecks) ineptly dealing with the alien invasion; luckily there's our badass Gary Stu protagonist, who in a shocking plot twist, discovers he's actually part alien himself, descended from 'good' aliens sent to protect the Earth from the bad aliens, and he has awesome psychic powers. The 'alien entity spread as a disease from spores' plot is undeveloped and not as interesting as it sounds, the plot is full of holes (if, as we eventually find out, the virus wiped out 99% of the Earth's population, why don't the uninfected soldiers and people outside the alien-infected town seem to be aware of this or ever mention it to our hero? I know this is 1972, but it's not like fricking phones didn't exist), and the whole thing resolves sort of like a really bad Doctor Who episode plus a skeevy romance (between the middle-aged hero and his teenage daughter's friend (!!?!? :P ). The best thing about it is the title, but the original serialization title "The Seeds of Gonyl" better expresses the story's inane pulpy tone.

[Lost Planet Airman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely a Laumer product along the lines of The Time Bender -- one male Chosen One, unaware of his heritage, winds up facing off against world-changing forces and impossible odds. Add a little stubborn misunderstanding by all around him and some aliens and superhumans and well -- late 60s early 70s sci-fi.

I read the hardback, 194 pages, and couldn't create a new edition, so... so -- fix it someday.

Lead character is an engineer, for 2025 SFFBC Team SF game.

[Printable Tire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of course I had to read this in November (even though in actuality it has practically nothing to do with November). It was some fast-paced, action-packed, mind-bending, loopy road trip apocalyptic stuff that with its altered realities reminded me of an early Philip K Dick novel, though it's more outright cosmic. It also had a couple of scenes that genuinely gave me the creeps, so congrats there. All within 186 pages, not bad!

Plus, it contained my new favorite technobabble:

Have you tried reaching out parallel to the laminar polarity of the enveloping inhibitory field?


In a single glimpse which scanned back down the endless avenue of time he saw the dim beginnings of this incredible being; the long, slow evolution of form and structure, the advent of neural responsiveness, the birth of mind, its growth and flowering into a mighty fountain of intellect. He observed as the Mone, achieving direct mental control of the mechanics of genetic and heredity, formed itself for expansion, launched itself on the ages-long campaign of destruction-absorption of competing intellectual species which ended in its sole and undisputed possession of its home Galaxy. He was witness as the great intelligence pruned itself, perfecting the purity of its cerebral function, trimming away the extraneous physical bodies which housed the multitudinous facets of its communal personality. The time came when the Mone-a race implicit in a single, integrated Galaxy- spanning thought complex-found itself faced with entropic death. Having mastered its environment too perfectly, it faced sensory deprivation of a degree commensurate with its frustrated abilities. Unless new challenges, new spectra of experience, could be found, it was doomed to wither, lose coherence, wink out of existence.

[Sheikykins · Rating 3 out of 5]

As someone who hasn't read an awful lot of science fiction, the premise of the book appealed to me and I thumbed through the pages, seeing that it wasn't "too" outside of my wheelhouse. I decided to buy it and read it all in one day. It started off as a pretty-well written novel, not-so-likeable characters and a rather flat narration at times, but enjoyable overall.
As we follow our main character, Jeff Mallory, after waking from his Rip Van Winkle-esque slumber to a family member having been erased from the minds of everyone he knows, his job non-existent, and the townspeople all mindlessly wandering to the tower that seemingly popped up overnight to "Work," he realizes quickly that the "men" patrolling the area are anything but and he escapes, a few injuries and some trauma later. He runs into some unsavory characters outside of town, among them the best friend of his missing daughter. She remembers her, and travels with him towards "the old house" that comes from a weak memory Jeff held on to. When they run into his missing daughter she is in a military holdout, convinced his story is the rambling of a madman. He leaves and finds "the old house," and is regaled as to why he remembered it. From here on, the book feels akin to someone taking a thesaurus and "beefing up" every sentence. The content itself was pretty solid, but — probably in an attempt to convey his "open" mind — very overtly, unnecessarily complicated sentence structures, the final act coming to a head, in my opinion, in a rush.
Overall, I think it's a fun read, if you're into dystopian horror fiction. It just felt a bit disjointed.

[Kevin Phyland · Rating 3 out of 5]

Geoff Mallory wakes up one morning to find that his last memories are of six months prior, his family seem a bit vacant and his oldest daughter Lori seems to have been removed from history. Gradually Mallory finds evidence that Lori does exist and that the entire population of his home town of Beatrice has been enslaved via hypnosis into doing some Work in a giant Tower. Escaping the aliens, who look like badly drawn humans, he seeks out an old house he has dreamed of since his orphan youth, and his Uncle Al, who may be an imaginary friend. He encounters groups of survivors who variously think it is a Russian invasion, a Chinese invasion, or Satan himself. Finally Geoff reaches the old house where he discovers that the infestation is a galactic swarm known as the Mone who take over planets. Inside a room of the house he finds a Galactic called Gonyl who is a Watcher planted centuries ago to warm if the Mone are near. Keith Laumer has given us a paranoia trip worthy of Philip Dick, where all hands are turned against Geoff and nobody is what they appear. Apart from the ending which is like a second-rate episode of Star Trek, it is well worth a read and won’t take all day. (Serialized as The Seeds Of Gonyl in IF)

[Roybot · Rating 1 out of 5]

This started off promising enough: guy wakes up in his house, but everything is just a little off. His clothes are shabbier, his hands are calloused and dirty when they shouldn't be, his face looks thinner and more haggard, and he clearly hasn't had a shave or haircut in some time. He gets downstairs and his wife and children are acting strange. They think he has a different job than he should, and, worst of all, none of them seem to remember that he has a teenage daughter. Even the door to her room is gone. Is he mad? Has something happened?

Unfortunately, it rapidly goes downhill from there. We're introduced to a number of oddball characters and situations, but none of it really means much. The final act involves a lot of hand waving and some pretty silly plot twists, and the resolution is pretty unsatisfying (and slightly gross... there are some plot contrivances that set up a romantic relationship between the protagonist and his daughter's friend, which is weird, gross, and unnecessary).

A lot of it ends up feeling like a bad Twilight Zone episode.

[Jedediah Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story begins with a scenario of weirdness that we have come to recognize as a Twilight Zone set-up: a man wakes up and everything has changed but no one will acknowledge it, first with his family, then his neighborhood, his hometown, and finally the world. The changes escalate as does his confusion. Eventually he meets others who have noticed the change as well but each has his own explanation and says our protagonist has lost his faculties. At this point the novel could embrace this ambiguity -- everyone has their own version of reality and who's to say which one is "real"? Instead, the protagonist finds establishes the truth (though with some more twists along the way). Then the novel falls into a standard Laumer motif: " lone-wolf, latent superhuman protagonists, self-sacrifice, and transcendence" (wiki). This gives the novel a mishmash feel, first one genre, then another. It's not entirely unsatisfying but in the transition, many questions are left unanswered. Overall a nice diversion but little more.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is this a post apocalyptic dystopian mind controlled world? Or a Russian invasion? Or maybe even Chinese? Or have Aliens invaded rural America?
One man awakes “confused” and goes on a rampage (mostly towards what’s left of the US Army and a few inbred locals) driven by his search for answers… and dreams he had as a child…

[Jenniffer · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn't like it at all. About aliens that come down and capture a town in the US and brainwashes everyone in the town to work for them. The US thinks they are being invaded by the Chinese. Amidst it all one man is some "Galaxy Protector", yet has been living among the humans in the conquered town. Just did not like the book at all.