THERE

THERE is an intertextual horror story about a disastrous marriage. Jack and Wendy live in a haunted house with their son. Their situation happens to echo a popular genre novel that was later adapted into a film. And yet anything familiar to the reader is bizarrely distorted. There is constant forward motion but no linearity, heart-stopping terror but no ghost. Jack and Wendy exist where time and place are broken and there may be no escape. Lonely Christopher's first novel is an intellectually rigorous and emotionally riveting perversion of classic horror tropes that explores how people destroy each other. Behind every word is a nightmarish secret. Read it if you dare.

"A white marriage between Stein and Huysmans, THERE takes on love and art, violence and weather, the horror of syntax and the locked-in Overlook Hotel of the mind. Lonely Christopher's sentences are like bony vertebrae behind which a slim lover hides a knife. But his true subject is the grim co-dependency of language and consciousness: what we do with words when we're alone with them, and what they do to us."

Joyelle McSweeney (The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults)

"Lonely thinks astutely about other texts and is not only clear but poetic in a way that is daring and rewarding. He cares about his topics and is also concerned about what ideas play off against each other as well as being impartial in their presentation so that the reader must be involved and committed to the outcome. I like this quality in any writer, but it is not all that common."

Samuel R. Delany (Dhalgren)

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