[Review] Noah Broyles’ House of Dust
The South is a ghost and so am I…
I grew up in the South. Not necessarily the backwoods country, dirt roads, and dead ends side of the South, but the South nonetheless. Even the most built up areas, one of which I was raised in, have rundown buildings with ivy roots running through them on the sides of the roads and secrets in the whispering sects of the community. No town here is big enough to miss the gossip and the rumors. I do have a bit of roots in the backends of the South, however, whether I want to own them or not. These are the areas where I learned what a whisper-warzone the church truly could be, what learning to drive a golf cart through single-stoplight towns is like, and what the power of social connection and belief can do for people who’s strongest ties to one another are the church. They might even be responsible for the level of belief I hold, no matter how much it has shifted from the things I was taught.
Growing up as I did, I’ve always had an interest in the Southern Gothic genre. There are right and wrong ways to do it; ways that fail and ways that fly. Noah Broyles’ House of Dust is one of the most successful I’ve encountered recently in terms of mood and atmosphere of a haunted town covered over with dust and secrets. It is a haunting effort that seeps under your skin and whispers into your subconscious that there, just on the edge of your sight, is something lingering in the shadows waiting to pull you in.
House of Dust tells the alternating stories of Brad Ellison, a true crime writer lured into the town by its mystery after tragedies of his own, and Missy Holiday, a former sex worker with a blood-spattered past of her own who follows her fiancée to the dilapidated town of Three Summers to try and be with him more in the face of his busy investigative work into the safety of the town’s infrastructure.
While it is possible to get a little lost in tracking which time period you’re in until fairly late in the novel, especially given that Missy’s fiancée goes unnamed for so long and the reveal of her time-ties to the house comes equally as late, I don’t think it necessarily detracts from the experience. I instead read it more as a way of placing you out of time in the same way that the town itself feels detached from the linear experience. Everything melts together in the dirt, everything melts together under Adamah.
There’s something irresistibly alluring about abandoned places. Growing up I always wanted to explore them through photography expeditions across the country. Not an original idea, to be sure, but the very fact that such a desire echoes in us all at one point or another speaks to their pull. Run down buildings of all sorts literally line the roads I ride through every day, left-behinds of the past with a history of their own buried beneath the vines that seek to swallow them. Broyles captures this spellbound feeling with apparent ease, propelling you along deeper into the story with the promise of secrets yet to be uncovered hidden in every well-crafted line.
Death lingers over the town of Three Summers and its inhabitants — whether they manage to escape it or not — as well as over every page of the story like sharp prickles of residue lingering just beneath the skin. The townsfolk here are intimately familiar with death and decay; how they respond to and feel about it is only a matter of interpretation. It is virtually impossible to discuss the plot at any length without treading into spoiler territory and, as this book will not unleash its lure on the world until September, suffice to say that the hold it takes on you is fierce and immediate.
Buried within House of Dust is a narrative device that acts as a trail of breadcrumbs for tracking your path that opens the novel to repeat readings long after you first wander the abandoned streets of Three Summers and encounter the mysterious Adamah. The Queen of Hearts within these pages may demand a sense of peace in her home, but you shall not find it in the restless nights of sleep Broyles’ work is sure to induce.
House of Dust comes to haunt your dreams from Inkshare Publishers on September 28, 2021.
I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to receive an ARC copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
