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Angel House

David Leo Rice (Goodreads Author)

4.90 · Rating details · 20 ratings · 10 reviews

After crossing a vast inland sea in an ark called ANGEL HOUSE, Professor Squimbop docks on a distant shore. As soon as his anchor makes purchase, a town sprouts up that may or may not encapsulate all of existence. At the behest of some distant master, he embarks into this town to teach the children about death, a concept they've never encountered before. What follows is a ...more

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Paperback, 1st, 426 pages

Published June 17th 2019 by Kernpunkt Press (first published June 13th 2019)

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Average rating 4.90 ·

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· 20 ratings · 10 reviews

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Jan 12, 2022 Samuel Moss rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2022, american, contemporary, dark, innovative, transgressive

A brilliant, maddening kaleidoscope of the obscene the mundane the nostalgic the impossible. Infinitely layered with meaning that goes nowhere, rife with the symbolism of the gutter.

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Feb 18, 2019 John Kazanjian rated it it was amazing

Angel House hooked me at the onset and held me throughout its thought-provoking story. It's rich with drama, surrealism, and complex (but always compelling) aesthetics. Rice's ability to connect the reader with the cast of characters on a deep level seemed to tailor the book's town to me. I feel as though the experiences in the novel stem from the unifying struggle we share in our quest to bring form to the abstractions that dwell within us. This sense is not limited to the artist's goals, but e ...more

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Feb 18, 2019 Andrei rated it it was amazing

Angel House creates a unique and hard-to-describe atmosphere that stays with the reader long after the book is finished. The author delights in shining a new light on the familiar from an angle that brings out its grotesque form. Highly recommended.

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Feb 20, 2019 Corbin Dallas rated it it was amazing

Wild stuff - strap in. Really impressive cast of characters, all of whom are interesting, all of whom are unusual - very highly recommend. The author must really live in that world, seems to know it well!

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Nov 15, 2021 David Fitzgerald rated it it was amazing

ANGEL HOUSE is the kind of novel that will mean something different to everyone who reads it, and indeed, will likely mean something different to me if I read it again in a few years, and yet again if I read it a third time somewhere down the line (all distinct possibilities). Because of this, I'll go ahead and readily admit that all my attempts to describe it here may fall short (and that this first one may have been heavily influenced by the charming, rudimentary maps of the book's central, in ANGEL HOUSE is the kind of novel that will mean something different to everyone who reads it, and indeed, will likely mean something different to me if I read it again in a few years, and yet again if I read it a third time somewhere down the line (all distinct possibilities). Because of this, I'll go ahead and readily admit that all my attempts to describe it here may fall short (and that this first one may have been heavily influenced by the charming, rudimentary maps of the book's central, inescapably small town provided on the opening pages), but I often found myself thinking of ANGEL HOUSE like a surrealist take on an old school, godview RPG - like if the original Legend of Zelda wandered over into Twin Peaks, Washington - its various, vaguely ominous locales emerging fully formed from the Earth, and rotating around, in and out of existence, only as characters happen upon them screen by screen, page by page.

And boy, do those characters cover a lot of ground for being trapped in such a limited, limiting locale. Some have been there their whole lives. Others left and came back. Some have designs on destroying the town (Professor Squimbop). Others are working to preserve it (the Mayor), immortalize it (James, a filmmaker), and even recreate it (Ben, an architect). But they're all there, circling one another (and the drain) in their fitful, futile efforts to find meaning in a place that means something different to all of them. Often doubled, and even tripled, via a literary mechanism that dabbles in both time travel and astral projection without ever really copping to being either, author David Leo Rice's eccentric cast of characters coexist with one another, as well as themselves at different ages, and in different places, all at once, and yet somehow still interact with, and even through their future and past selves, all without ever getting particularly convoluted or even feeling all that hard to visualize. Oh, and there are no women. I'm not really sure why. I could speculate, but it's one of those things I mentioned earlier that will probably mean something a little different to everyone, including me the next time I read it (a prospect which feels increasingly likely, the further I get into writing this review).

Anyway, Rice uses this ingenious technique (which he may have also invented. I don't know. I haven't read all the books. But I've definitely never seen it before.) to create a kind of flattened multiverse through which to explore the states of constant flux between youthful ambition and adult compromise, even making room for physical manifestations of the countless roads not taken along that all-too-familiar journey. In this way, ANGEL HOUSE unfolds and expands exponentially, even as its suburban walls seem to be forever closing in, drawing you into its intimate, infinite snare trap world via maps and legends, signs and wonders, memories and dreams, and then all but inviting you to project onto it whatever experience of smalltown life you already hold inside yourself. The sub-weird and the blankheads; the blindspot and the inland sea; the hibernation and the reunion; DUST HOUSE and ANGEL HOUSE; Rice's mystical matrix of signifiers will feel familiar to anyone who has ever lived anywhere (ie - all of us), and through a kind of generous, authorial magic, your particular anywhere will begin to feel like the very place he's writing about; the very source of the book in your hands.

Warmly, squirmily alive - practically rising up out of the paper like an enchanted pop-up book, and then steadily folding back in on itself the further you go along - this shifty, slippery, and infinitely mutable text can feel, at times, like a chronicle of its own perennial cycle of creation and disintegration - a kind of mobius meditation on the nature of life and art. It's in a weird font. It's got hand-drawn illustrations that correspond to its primary characters. There's a really unusual little hiccup where, for a while at least, the even numbered pages are on the right, and then somewhere along the way they switch back to the left. The whole thing is a little reminiscent of those ancient, wizarding tomes that appear blank at first glance, only for ornate, illuminated text to appear on the page to which they're opened. You might find yourself wondering "if I flip back fast enough, will the words I just read still be there?" It's a wild trip. But if you're like me, you'll come away with more to ponder and wonder about - laugh and cry about (because, for all this talk of the strange and surreal, it is also really funny in places, and brutally sad in others) - from this mirific work than you can possibly digest in one go-around. And now that we've arrived at the end, I think I can say with absolute certainty that I'll be reading it again in a few years. I already can't wait to find out what it will mean to me. ...more

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Jun 17, 2019 Isaac Shivvers rated it it was amazing

A bizarre and captivating story with an interesting interplay between a few different ideas: there's a cautious relationship between two old friends, complicated by their divergent histories; a tenuous balance between local and global forces (sometimes helpful, sometimes threatening); a woozy back-and-forth between the fever-dreams of the narrators and the truly fucked-up world they inhabit.

Check this book out - it's a great dive into a surreal and yet unsettlingly (sometimes ashamedly) familiar ...more

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Nov 04, 2019 Kristen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2019, fiction, friends-books

Angel House is an eerie and melancholy read. Its protagonists, two best friends, exist simultaneously as nine-year-olds dreaming of making movies, and twenty-nine-year-olds just returned from some City to which they had escaped. It captures the barrenness and horror of being stuck in a small town, and the monstrous strangeness of trying to proverbially "go home again," with fiercely inventive and grotesque (sometimes disturbing) images. And along with the horror elements there's a lot of genuine ...more

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Jun 03, 2022 Vincent Perrone rated it it was amazing

There's only one town to escape or embrace. Rice's compendium of this singular town—with its school, its hotel, its movie store—is unyielding in its pull. Much as Angel House's protagonists (drifters, loners, psychically-liked duos) are drawn into vortexes of their own curiosities and obsessions, the book itself pulls you toward new portals of thought.

There's nothing quite like Angel House; one part uncanny adventure, one part psychic horror show, one part urtext of a new mythology. The charact ...more

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Mar 25, 2020 Jon Perry rated it it was amazing

Angel House is a book like no other. I'm not exaggerating in the slightest. A darkly comic and psychedelic journey through a dilapidated nostalgic dream/nightmare world. I enjoyed it immensely and laughed often.

Professor Squimbop is a unique and refreshing character (I hesitate to call him a villain). If there is more Squimbop literature, which there deserves to be, I will devour it as he devours us. J.L. Wind's speech is one of the funniest things I've read and will stick with me for a long ti ...more

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Apr 28, 2020 Andrew rated it it was amazing

In this novel, characters who exist in superposition attend a reunion in a town that may just be a template (since most places and businesses have purposefully generic names), where everything is identifiable and grotesquely defamiliarized, since everything seems to exist as a nightmare version of all that gooey nostalgia you have for your old stomping grounds, which are, by the way, being haunted by a terrifying figure who has no analogue, but who does have a goofy name: Professor Squimbop. And ...more

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