Fast Country

Foreclosure Gothic by Harris Lahti. Astra House, 240 pages. 2025.

Beaverboard, the pre-Depression clean white spruce sheeting used in putting up American houses, is the canvas for Grant Wood’s American Gothic, perhaps the most widely recognized American painting post-1800. It is not to be confused with beaverwood, a tree which rots easily and is only used in the cheapest of constructions. That beaverboard shares most of a name with its inverse means opposites are camouflaged as cousins. It’s this same irony that animates Wood’s painting: farmer and wife/daughter (ambiguous) take stoic pride posed in front of a Carpenter Gothic-style home—but does this bounty make them happy?

Harris Lahti’s debut novel, Foreclosure Gothic, begins with the most classic of American flourishings: “After two years of rejection, somehow, finally, Vic Greener lands an agent.” A pre-millennium Hollywood dreamer, he also lands a real-life lover, Heather, and later, a recurring role on Days of Our Lives playing a cocaine-addled doctor caught up in a murder plot. In an ellipsis, Vic and Heather break up and get back together; she gets pregnant, and he gets written off the show. These points exist in the year-spanning blanks between chapters, the heyday season of Vic’s acting life skipped clean. Vic, the nucleus of the three generations of Greeners that populate the novel, moves with Heather to upstate New York, where they were both born and raised. His father is a carpenter, and Vic falls into a second career flipping creaky houses, the first of which is a foreclosure left behind by an elderly deceased couple. Molded yogurt and loose pill bottles get tossed into plastic bags, curbed, while talk of returning to Los Angeles for audition season becomes a stale refrain. In the basement, Vic notices two historic gravestones—for mother and child—and it’s only these remnants of the long-dead, and not the dead folks that left groceries to expire in the fridge, that he has to anxiously coax himself into living atop.

Removed from the cosmopolitanism of Los Angeles, Vic’s a pioneer in an underpopulated idyll. A nail gun is his lasso. An orbital sander his till. The cowboy fantasy of voluntarily outcasting oneself from workman society is rendered as a petit bourgeois parable about the small-time entrepreneur. Being a landlord, after all, is downstream of the land-dominating valor of Wood’s 1930 farm family. But the America of Lahti’s novel is not a Dylan-esque freewheel of artistic whim and emotional solvency but an economic reality dictated by material circumstances. The cage upon which artistic ambition can conform and be subjugated is built out of sheetrock.

Lahti spikes his generational unfurling of high suburban malaise with episodes of actual, vaguely primordial danger. The first comes as Vic mows the lawn in an effort to get the ticks cleared out for his young son, Junior. From atop his John Deere, he acknowledges three old women he’s met before, now loitering by his mailbox, apparitions escaped from the senior center. Their gestures are similarly classical, “trying to conjure him with their long fingers.” He thinks perhaps he’s been summoned again as Dr. Mack, the Days of Our Lives character that they recognize him as; instead, the third woman collapses, “howling, incomprehensible with pain as her dehydrated body tries and fails to right itself.” Only a TV doctor, Vic attends to the woman’s health emergency as a false expert; as the “doctor” on scene, he convinces the ladies, she’ll be fine without medical attention. What happens next goes unresolved, out of frame. Who knows if she’s died. This chapter, itself a reworking of a piece Lahti published in Hobart in 2019, is part of what lends the novel a collection-like looseness with abrupt cutoff. Atmospheric and non-paternalistic, the narrative allows for many gaps and slits in which the reader can assume for themself.

The next chapter proceeds to describe the Greener’s generally benign garden plot—whose most frightening product is simply misshapen produce—in maximally nefarious terms.

The backyard garden is a fenced-in pool of murky black Jell-O that sucks and belches up Heather’s feet as she collects its monstrous and misshapen produce into wicker baskets: onions the size of bowling balls, carrots bent at right angles, apples whose fragrance draws those fucking deer to the fence each night to moan.

A seizing old lady with a dehydrated body and long fingers, a belching garden with grotesque vegetation; Lahti stretches as far as a contemporary gothic can go, in the age of information and disbelief, without verging into a pure pulp. Within these short scenes are enough cues—grounding details like the ordinary farmers’ market—to underscore that these encounters with the sinister mundane are not standing in for the supernatural but are rather fantastical grafts which approximate how bizarre the world we know remains. With danger averted in the space between chapters, Lahti does not let his characters ruminate or explicitly process trauma, always a half foot ahead of the anxiety of his prose. Within a two-hundred-page history of multiple generations, we move at too close a clip to consider what grows in the gaps between superstition and rational fear.

Meanwhile, money doesn’t sleep. In their domestic search for profit, Vic and Heather take another couple as tenants in their home. A seven-foot-tall garbageman and his stay-at-home wife, Vic and Heather’s social inferiors aren’t named beyond an occupation in junk removal, except for one brief aside. The connection between the two couples, at first hopeful, becomes clumsy.

When they move out, Vic and Heather discover that they’ve drilled peepholes into the antique wallpaper, creating an illegal viewing window through their landlords’ side of the wall. Animal screams heard at night lay the Greeners at further unease. Idly paranoid, Heather shovels a raccoon carcass she found on the roadside into her truck and orders a night vision camera. She positions the body-bait outside, the camera set to record and captures, in between the crews of deer and the tufts of vegetation, a hollering raccoon in necrocoitus with the roadkill. But like Vic and the woman who collapsed on his front lawn, the scene likewise doesn’t create waves of anguish for her to parse throughout succeeding chapters. She glazes unperturbed over the obvious trouble:

Apparently, she comes to learn, it isn’t unusual among the species. Not at all. She isn’t surprised, however. Come to think of it, Heather’s never been surprised once in her life. Not even when she discovered the peepholes. Not when she told Vic she was pregnant just a few months after reappearing in his life. Or when he dropped to his knee to beg her to marry him. Not when a vein exploded in her stepfather’s stomach and blood shot across the room from his large mouth. Or even when her mother died slowly, not two years after Junior’s birth, with none of the tough grit she exhibited throughout her life. Concerned? Maybe. But surprised? Heather? Never once.

Vic loves the photo, even if he doesn’t quite grasp that the bottom mammal is dead. She prints—and at Vic’s request, frames—the image of the desecration (“Like a Harlequin novel, she thinks. Like a scene straight out of Days of Our Lives”). While another couple might have seen crude portent, the burden for the Greeners is eased through the private language of sexual gamesmanship. The couple has transcendent sex, reasserting their home life after the feckless episode of tenancy. In spite of this, something briefly rankles Heather about the garbage family’s stay, but “before she can express the ways in which natural instincts—such as earning money—can sometimes lead to maladaptive behavior in the artificial world we live in,” Vic’s enthusiasm gets in the way, and the story continues. This light jab toward roving critique, quickly abandoned, is a telling gesture of the moral toll of such American dreams.

Rather than set pieces or episodes, Foreclosure Gothic consists of micro-events which may well have constituted a full novel were its protagonists not inured to scandal and crisis; but in this bouncing peak of plotlets, the future is foreclosed, and everything is a gloss of everything else. A lady in collapse, the savagery of animals, peepholes in the drywall—the story merely continues. The novel is already halfway over by the time the Greeners frame the sexed raccoon, Junior just a very young boy. The second half of the novel alternates between further crises that envelop Vic and Junior alike. Junior, haunted by the opportunism of his own scythe, helps Vic renovate the foreclosures of the dead, forgotten, and poor and gets lost on a runaway surf vacation overseas; Vic, in turn, speeds the interstate stoned on cocaine after a reunion party in New Jersey and inhales enough sawdust to stuff a taxidermy mount. Readers expecting a multigenerational story in the model of, say, East of Eden will be surprised to find exponential attention paid to the first generation: Junior’s daughter is but a resemblant dot in the distance.

Junior does, however, witness his dad’s devotion to unprocessed entrepreneurship that replaces an awareness of danger. As a toddler, Junior is a “little suicidal seed” sinking into dirt up to his knees; a bit older and he’s silent, aloof, with a stutter and a “glaring vacancy” at dinner. Staring off into the reflection of a window during night, Heather imagines their family phase-shifted out of the sadness she sees in the black; perhaps this unit will cohere, “their intentions glued together by an eternity of black muck.” Generational tension, however, only goes so far when father and son are also coworkers.

In one passage, Junior struggles back tears while landscaping across the road from an onion field in mid-harvest. An old man in an oxygen mask, George, comes by and offers him a lemon to suck on, to mitigate the acrid smell. He worries the inhabitants have died, but George just laughs—they’ve moved into a new apartment downtown. “What the hell made you think something like that?” George asks. Days go by and Junior sees the dead in every corner. He attempts to hide the funeral dirge on his mind from his father, Vic, but finds himself humming anyway. When a trash fire later spreads to a structure while Junior and Vic are outdoors working, Vic runs to put out their accident. Junior urges his short-of-breath father to go to the hospital, but he declines; the next day, Vic pulls a box from his truck and Junior asks: Is this a casket? Vic echoes George in his reply: “‘The hell’s the matter with you,’ he says, unlocking the box: ‘it’s your new friend.’” Junior’s pragmatic gift is a jackhammer, the tool needed for the next step in their house flip.

These episodes of danger culminate in Vic’s sudden, old-age death, a heart attack while sanding down hardwood floors without a respirator. In the hour before his death, he had been confronted by relatives of the former owner, whose collection of child pornography he finds cleaning out the house. Up against their shotguns, Vic disarms the two relatives with his own will: “I’ve been chasing success for almost eighty years. I’ve provided for my family. And the one thing I’ve learned is the only way to make money is to earn it.”

Somehow, the goons become his momentary handymen, having been convinced to clear carpet for him in exchange for the couple hundred they thought they could take by force. Even in his death, Vic escapes the ramification of plot; it’s not the shotgun that kills him but his own pursuit of ambition and desire to just get the floors done. Problems are not plot points, episodes fail to balloon into operas, and life is distinguished less by what happens in it than that it is what happens to be on. The Gothic genre, with its overt symbols of psychic toll, is capacious enough for the private struggles of its inhabitants to hide.

So what is so scary about the woodland rural suburbs in between New York and Buffalo? In Foreclosure Gothic, the threat of violence is more vivid for being unacknowledged. Behind every cul-de-sac an undiagnosed, private pain, duct taped by financial desire. American lonesomeness accompanies the landlord-cowboy wherever his truck will go. You hear this flatness in the opening credits of Days of Our Lives: “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.” That the show itself—first aired in 1965 and still in production—has outlived many of its viewers is a feature, not a bug.

Delete American from the title of pop-cultural artifacts and receive a spread of words between the violent and the aspirational: Football, Pie, Gothic, Apparel, Psycho, Sniper, Gangster, Horror Story, Idol. Transpose foreclosure and American and get closer to the hollow lilt of generational growth and generational ends. Lahti’s Foreclosure Gothic understands the real horror is within the grind to nowhere: at least ghosts and vampires mean something. As son becomes father, and as novelistic time starts to foreclose upon itself, Lahti’s characters swerve around plot points—from bad neighbors to reckless driving—that may have killed them on a more sinister day. It is this perpetual evasion of the end of the story—that is, death—that grafts a family tree onto a nation, a house onto a cement foundation. Build it up, tear it down, sell; have a son, raise him, and let him outlive you. It’s all sawdust anyway.