The Kills

May 5, 2014
Longlisted for the Man Booker, House’s thousand-plus-page novel is an intense, frustrating yet unforgettable tale of U.S. contractors working amid corruption, betrayal, and murder in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The novel is made up of four books. The first, “Sutler,” follows Brit John Ford (aka Sutler), a contractor at Camp Liberty in Baghdad. After employer Paul Geezler of HOSCO International instructs him to draw his final payment using a convoluted system of accounts, a deadly explosion sends Sutler on the run; Geezler claims the contractor stole $53 million from funds allocated for the Massive, a military complex to be built in the desert. The Massive exists only on paper, in contrast to Camp Liberty’s burn pits for destroying medical and military waste, which are very real but undocumented. The second book, entitled “The Massive,” follows the men who tend the burn pits, as each meets a premature demise. In the fourth book, “The Hit,” Sutler is sighted at three separate locations, and Geezler goes missing. Set apart from books one, two, and four, the third book, “The Kill,” set in Naples and populated with prostitutes and language students, is metafiction at its most gruesome. While it’s different from the other three books, it addresses the same themes: how do killers become killers? How do victims become victims? How do perpetrators turn into victims, and vice versa? How do money, people, places, and crimes disappear? House probes but does not answer these questions. He presents intriguing characters and enthralling scenarios, then leaves readers to make sense of it all. This huge undertaking is notable for its ambition, and it seduces with both its shortcomings and its accomplishments.

June 1, 2014
A sprawling, subterranean, sometimes-surreal novel of the new world order, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, in which Bolano and Pynchon wave in passing as we dodge between IEDs and sinister plots.House (Uninvited, 2001, etc.) has scarcely introduced us to civilian contractor John Jacob Ford before Ford is told to disappear: An op has been blown and it's best for him to skedaddle. What's he been doing? All kinds of shady work in Iraq for a company named HOSCO; one mission involves the transport of millions and billions of dollars in cash (easily skimmable) in "backpacks, suitcases, briefcases, even brown-paper bags." Ford, duly renamed Sutler, now finds himself in the thick of an elaborate project to construct a secret city in the desert of southern Iraq-to what purpose remains murky, but clearly it's all for the fiscal benefit of the company and the various First World flags under which it flies. (It's a nicely symbolic touch that the illusory city is to be founded atop a flaming garbage dump that doesn't officially exist.) As the story progresses, Ford/Sutler's attachment to the real world becomes increasingly tenuous: He's a shadow in a world of spooks, a cipher barely moored to the planet the rest of us inhabit. As he travels through the desert and beyond, moving from book to book (there are three more-or-less closely related tales here and a fourth that, at least in a fashion, rules them all), the stories told about him and all the weird goings-on in the Mesopotamian sands become ever more hushed, ever more fraught. That a tumultuous place such as Iraq invites Rashomon-like treatment is a commonplace, but House's tale, ingenious and well-written as it is, goes on much too long. And though he does a good job controlling details and making economical use of his secondary characters, the story is too clever by half, with threads too easy to lose.Ambitious and often brilliant. But, as one character says, "It's confusing." And so it is.

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Starred review from May 1, 2014
War is hell. It's also big business. And, in this remarkable, epic literary venture, a novel in four parts that was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, House explores the collateral damage of our capitalist way of going to war. In Sutler, a civilian working in Southern Iraq under a false name, Sutler, for a Halliburton-like contractor (HOSCO) is told to disappear; he understands he's being scapegoated for embezzlement but has no idea of the scale. In The Massive, at a site where HOSCO's waste is burned with complete disregard for workers' health, Sutler arrives to begin planning a city that will never be built. The Kill is a story about a student's murder in Naples, told in multiple outsider viewpoints, the basis for a book within the book that recurs enigmatically throughout The Kills. And The Hit shows the endgame, as multiple sightings of Sutler confuse the embezzler's attempts to contain the damage from the theft. Part Olen Steinhauer spy thriller and part Roberto Bolao art novel, with a huge cast of characters, many Middle Eastern settings, and a puzzle of a time-shifting plot, The Kills is a work of intense artistic conviction and demands a serious commitment from its readers. They'll be rewarded, even if the center of this dazzlingly large picture is elusive. After all, for men chasing money in the desert, perspective may just be another mirage.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

March 1, 2014

Though classed as military fiction, this work is described by the publicist as John le Carre meets Roberto Bolano, cinematic in a Syriana kind of way, and one of those rare thrillers to get long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Plus, the author has had two short, moody novels published in the innovative "High Risk" series from Serpent's Tail. So this is not your average contractors-in-Iraq book. Actually, it only starts out with contractors in Iraq, then leads us across continents. A gritty, kaleidoscopic read, not for the faint of heart; originally published in four separate volumes and as an innovatively enhanced ebook in Great Britain.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2014

House's (Uninvited) thousand-page epic, first published in Britain as four stand-alone ebooks (Sutler; The Massive; The Kill; The Hit) and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2013, is now collected in one massive omnibus. Modeled after Roberto Bolano's labyrinthine 2666, the novel blends the geopolitical machinations of an espionage thriller with DeLilloesque levels of conspiracy and metafiction. In the first book, a government contractor known as Sutler goes on the lam when $53 million earmarked for rebuilding Iraq disappears with him. The Massive serves as a prolog, focusing on the American civilians who work at an Iraqi burn pit before Sutler arrives. The third book concerns a text called The Kill, referenced by characters in the first two volumes, about a pair of brothers who read about a fictional murder and re-create it, beginning a complex loop of art imitating life. The final book, The Hit, attempts to tie the strands together, as a German diplomat's sister-in-law takes up the search for Sutler. It's tough to summarize this book succinctly and equally tough to forge through in places, so dense is the writing, and might be best considered in its original form as four separate volumes. The work is also intended to be interactive; readers can find supplemental audio and video material on the publisher's website, though the extras aren't essential to the story. VERDICT House's doorstop of a tome demands considerable attention and patience from readers, and those prepared to offer it will find subtle intertextual rewards. Others will be frustrated by the sudden narrative shifts among each volume and the deliberate lack of resolution. Recommended for those who wished their John le Carre came more postmodern and surreal. [See Prepub Alert, 2/10/14.]--Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.