Foreclosure Gothic, Harris Lahti’s debut novel, is a chilling, absorbing, searingly memorable work of gothic fiction. Portents loom around every corner—vultures, scythes, unattributable screams—and nature is a “witch’s brew of mistrust” where hulking garbagemen roam alongside necrophiliac raccoons. While such spooky surrealism may occasionally skew the picture, don’t be fooled—Foreclosure Gothic is a deeply human, and deeply personal, story about intergenerational cycles and the financial reality of creative ambition. Read it once for the sinewy poetry and evocative imagery. Read it twice to unveil the sly plotting and subtly intricate architecture. Like a foreclosed property, there is a “house behind the house.” Lahti’s debut rewards repeat readings.

The novel centers on Vic Greener, an aspiring actor who abandons Hollywood with zero film credits to his name—just a guest spot as a coke-addicted doctor on a daytime soap. He follows the enchanting Heather, pregnant with their child, to her hometown in New York’s Hudson Valley, a few highway exits from where Vic’s own father continues to make his living restoring foreclosed homes. Vic always believed himself fated to follow his father’s career path, and the birth of Junior Greener expedites the process: Hollywood dreams don’t pay bills, especially when LA’s a few thousand miles away. Decades later, in this simultaneously sweeping and compact family saga, Junior may be sucked up by the Greener fate as well.

Harris Lahti is an editor at Fence, a co-founder of the indie press Cash 4 Gold Books, a prolific short story writer, and a painter/house renovator. I spoke with him over Zoom about his haunting debut. In this wide-ranging conversation, we touch on gothic fiction, alternative literature, and some of the real stories behind his fictional creations.

Michael Knapp: Parts of your novel appeared previously as short stories. Did you always have a larger project in mind for the Greener characters, or did you stumble into a novel?

Harris Lahti: I stumbled into a novel. The undertaking of a novel is so immense that sometimes you have to trick yourself into writing one. I wrote “Sugar Bath,” one of the earlier chapters, and then I wrote “House Ceremony,” one of the later chapters, and then I space docked them together. It’s an interesting way to write, because once you have those two elements you can synthesize them. You’re using raw materials that exist instead of constantly inventing.

Those two sections generated a lot of curiosity for me, and it proliferated until the book felt fully formed. There are more chapters I wish I could write now; the book’s characters live on in their own way. But once I started adding pictures I knew it was done.

MK: Foreclosure Gothic spans 50 years and three generations of Greener men. It’s a compact book with a sprawling scope—a new chapter might mean another decade gone. What were the challenges with scaffolding such an expansive novel?

HL: I initially wrote each chapter outside of time, then I inserted little timestamps about, say, Venice Beach in the eighties to ground it on a timeline. But to tell you the truth, what I really focused on was sentence level tension. Readers will give you slack if you’re entertaining them—they’ll glance past questions the idle mind might ponder.

I wrote a third person novel, but I think of it as first because the psychic distance is about as close as you can get, and then it’s also written in present tense. It’s all working to hold the reader’s attention; it insulates itself from the problems of tackling such a vast swath of time.

MK: I appreciate the timestamps—whether it’s a cell phone or the financial crisis. But I also like how you respect the reader’s ability to catch up to the present without bogging things down in exposition.

HL: People are a lot more intelligent than we give them credit for. I think big publishers often condescend to the reader. Anytime you’re supplying space for the reader to mull something over you’re engaging them; you’re allowing the words to fall away, and the reader enters the dream of fiction. It’s something I’m very aware of with both the fiction I publish and the fiction I write.

MK: As the title suggests, your novel belongs somewhere in the gothic tradition. It’s filled with haunted homes, necrophiliac raccoons, gargantuan garbagemen. That said, it never slips fully into genre, and I think protagonist Vic would endorse the novel’s real-world grounding: he turns “his nose up at genre,” believing the real world to be “strange enough.” Are you consciously playing with, or against, horror tropes? Do you agree with Vic’s thoughts on genre?

HL: I find portents much more interesting than horror itself—it’s a “why show the shark” kind of thinking. The horror I’m more interested in is grounded in the uncanny, in a Lynchian or Bolaño-esque sense. It’s a feeling of uncertainty—a psychological fear charged by ambiguity.

I have my father-in-law’s HBO Max account, and I’ll watch the first twenty minutes of horror movies endlessly. I always wonder what he thinks I’m doing: “Why are you watching the first twenty minutes of Microwave Massacre and Blood Hook on repeat?” I love the beginnings of horror movies—they’re ripe with portents. Once the horror starts to reveal itself, it’s rarely as interesting, because you have to fall back on tropes.

I like the metaphor of deer after a thunderstorm. They come out into the meadow and dance, because the storm has put something inside of them. Each chapter in my novel is trying to do something similar: I’m getting right up to the point where the horror will be introduced, and then, by taking an unexpected exit, it continues to accrete.

MK: A lot of the horror is also alleviated by a jump in time, which feels true to life. In the moment you might feel tortured by some terrifying, life-altering force. Then ten years later you don’t remember it.

HL: A hundred percent. That’s how memory works. It’s a big deal in the moment, and then you move along. You’re eating brunch somewhere and you’re not thinking about the seven-foot-tall garbage man; the next new horror you’ll live through approaches.

MK: I actually am still thinking about the seven-foot-tall garbageman. But in addition to gothic fiction, your novel might belong to a more contemporary tradition: alternative literature (alt-lit). You’ve published in a lot of the movement’s preeminent journals—New York Tyrant, X-R-A-Y, Hobart, Forever—and you edit fiction at Fence, another alt-lit stalwart. I know this kind of question dominates literary discourse these days, but what does alt-lit represent to you? Do you consider your work—Foreclosure Gothic in particular—part of it?

HL: I think Foreclosure Gothic is more stylized, but I do often file myself in the alt-lit world. I like that it’s scrappier, and there’s less gatekeeping than at larger college-run journals.

The best thing about alt-lit is that it’s run by tyrants, like Giancarlo [DiTrapano], Tao [Lin], Madeline [Cash] and Anika [Levy], Derek White, Elizabeth Ellen. They’re tastemakers; they put the work out there and say, “This is what I like.” I think the auteur theory of directing applies to editing here; these people have their own vision.

MK: Speaking of editorial vision, you and Jon Lindsey just co-founded an indie press: Cash for Gold Books (C4G). You released your first two books last year: Sillyboy by Peter Vack and The Champ is Here by Nathan Dragon. What are your goals for the press, beyond “finding the freaks,” which I’ve seen you talk about in other interviews? What’s C4G up to now?

HL: I said that? I like that.

We just had the launch party for Elizabeth Hall’s Season of the Rat. The crowd was so good—it was getting a lot of support. Then we have another book coming, a collection of short stories by David Ryan.

Basically, we’re putting out books that need to be put out. The path to publication is so difficult, and people who deserve books often don’t get the opportunity. Like, I’m a skateboarder, and everybody who does it or watches it gets along and encourages each other. Nobody’s trying to get anything out of skating except the enjoyment of the act. Why isn’t writing like that?

Jon and Nathan and I want to make the scene better; we want to improve the culture. Our way of doing that is to not take ourselves too seriously, but to take the work deathly seriously. We want to make it fun and interesting and flip the finger at those people that said no to the writers we’re publishing. Maybe we’ll change some hearts and minds along the way.

MK: I notice a kind of editorial sensibility in your novel, in terms of both the events you choose to include and, more so, the ones you choose not to include. The intentionality of your choices clarifies as the novel progresses, but why, for example, feature a farmer’s market and skip the birth of a child?

HL: You have to be curious about what you’re writing, and a lot of conventional stuff just didn’t interest me. If you’re not creating narrative friction that is uncanny or unexpected just do away with it. Don’t bother. That’s why it’s exciting to write a compact novel that’s so expansive. I can pick and choose my points. Otherwise, you get bogged down in the furniture moving of narrative fiction.

I’ve been an editor for a long time, and I’ve always felt the mark of a mature writer is what they choose to leave out more than what they put in.

MK: In the book, Junior himself is a writer. His father, Vic, is an actor, and Heather’s a serial storyteller. Later in their marriage, Vic feels the well of conversation running dry. He worries they’ve run out of stories to share. A lot of these characters try to make a living as storytellers, but I’m interested in how storytelling is so integral to these characters even divorced from moneymaking. What is it about stories that’s so important to them?

HL: My knee-jerk impulse is to relate it to evolution, and how we build myths around ourselves to maintain a sense of self. In a way, it’s counterintuitive. We construct imaginary worlds to help understand reality. That’s what I think religion is, and that’s what literature has become for me.

I was talking to a writer working on a historical novel. He said he needs to do all this research because people will kick the tires on the real thing he’s fictionalizing. I want nothing to do with that; I’m more interested in the world that’s strained through fiction because, in a weird way, the more you understand about the reality of the world, the more confusing it becomes.

For me personally, my father was an actor. He walked away from it after he had kids because it wasn’t paying the bills. Now I’m a writer, and I’m trying to justify it. Not many make the cut solely as a writer. I’m always thinking about that and working through it, and writing these stories is me trying to understand that. It’s something I struggled with subconsciously, and I didn’t fully understand it until showing my dad the novel.

You’re making sense of uncertainty through fiction. I think you do it more truthfully with a novel as opposed to something like a memoir.

MK: A young Junior wants to be a novelist, and he contemplates a disconnect between his writing and the work his dad does restoring homes: “Creativity is the residue of rest,” he says. Later on, his attitude changes: he works “piece by piece, sentence by sentence”; an “idle itchiness” descends if he’s “not painting a house or working on a novel.” You yourself renovate houses, and I wonder what you make of this connection between physical work and a writing practice?

HL: Writing is work. You have to show up and make it happen. There is this other element where you have to live in order to write, but then at some point you need to step outside the world of the living and make space to create.

One feeds the other, and it’s why I’ll never run out of stories. Every house I do, I meet new people; I see new things. Just the other day I was on a roof, and this guy starts talking to me. He’s wobbling, I can tell he’s drunk, and when I come down this dog wanders up the road. When it gets closer, I see it’s hairless, and it’s blue. It’s a blue dog, only it doesn’t really look like a dog. Not exactly. Then I see a pointy nose and come to realize it’s a mangy fox. Possibly rabid. The drunk guy starts walking up to it, clapping his hands, saying, “Here, doggy doggy! Here, doggy doggy!”

It’s the kind of moment that’s endlessly interesting to me, and I try to understand it and contextualize it with fiction. Whether you work in a kitchen or a school, the stories propagate through your experiences. 

But maybe most aren’t as strange as that.

MK: The opening chapter’s titled “This Only Ends One Way,” and there’s a feeling of preordainment pervading the book; The Greeners’ past pulls them forward into an eerily familiar, and seemingly inevitable, future, restoring foreclosed homes in the Hudson Valley. Did you ever envision Foreclosure Gothic wandering off in a different direction? Can these characters—can anyone—escape their past?

HL: Especially if you’re doing what your parents do, it’s hard to extricate yourself. I could get some shitty job, but this is the way I make money, and when you have two kids and a wife you can’t really justify something other than the best option. Or maybe I’m not inventive enough to think of another path forward.

I think we’re all stuck. Free will is a funny thing. Maybe this is too lofty, but…

MK: Let’s get lofty.

HL: Let’s do it. Personally, I never really surprise myself. It’s hard to free yourself from patterns. Those neural pathways get ground down and you become complacent.

I’ve always respected people who burn their lives down and start again. A lot of us try to make that leap, and then we keep adjusting our expectations until we’re right back where in our heart of hearts we thought we’d end up all along.

MK: This feeling of predestination is amplified by a sense of foreboding: vultures portend doom, janky ceiling fans evoke our cyclical lives, and the scythe Junior wields to trim overgrown grass speaks to foreclosure as the grim reaper—financial death for one family, and the endless chain of renovations linking the Greeners to their end. How deliberate are the various symbols here—do they connote something specific? Or are they more ornamentation?

HL: Both, I guess, but to tell you the truth, so much is ripped from the headlines of my life. My earliest memories are playing in old houses that really freaked me out.

The scythe, for example. That’s something that happened. I was taming an unruly lawn full of shotgun shells and beer cans, and the lawnmower broke. What do you do? You go into one of the barns and, lo and behold, there’s a scythe.

It’s true and it’s real. And there were vultures, and the house was full of belongings from a family that seemed to have disappeared, and I couldn’t figure out why that would happen to a family. I was sixteen; I grew up in a loving home—a nice house, a big property—and it was confusing to me. Where’d they go?

So your mind jumps to death. The vultures are there suggesting what vultures suggest, and you have a scythe in your hand. It all coheres in a way that seems intentional, but I’m not inventing it.

MK: To close, I’m curious about creative influences. You mentioned Bolaño, David Lynch, and the first twenty minutes of horror movies; who or what else has influenced your work?

HL: The first 20 minutes of all horror movies. That’s definitely up there.

There’s also Fleur Jaeggy—her clipped sentences and sinister tone. I would put Elfriede Jelinek in that category. The Piano Teacher was a big novel for me when I was writing Foreclosure Gothic. I think the filmmaker Lars Von Trier struggles with his subject matter in very personal ways I’ve tried to adopt. Then I love the collected works of Breece D’J Pancake. Cormac McCarthy is a big one. I’ve read everything he’s written a bunch of times. Oh and William Gay wrote this fucked up story called “The Paperhanger” that I reread about a thousand times. If you’ve never read it you have to read it. It’s completely insane. Graves will be robbed.