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Synopsis:

With his “highly visual and cinematic worldbuilding” (Booklife by Publishers Weekly), Brian Asman spins a horrifying and imaginative tale of an ordinary family and their extraordinary new house…

Sabrina Haskins and her family have just moved into their dream home, a gorgeous Craftsman in the rapidly-growing Southwestern city of Jackson Hill. Sabrina’s a bored and disillusioned homemaker, Hal a reverse mortgage salesman with a penchant for ill-timed sports analogies. Their two children, Damien and Michaela, are bright and precocious.

At first glance, the house is perfect. But things aren’t what they seem.

Sabrina’s hearing odd noises, seeing strange visions. Their neighbors are odd or absent. And Sabrina’s already-fraught relationship with her son is about to be tested in a way no parent could ever imagine.

Because while the Haskins family might be the newest owners of 4596 James Circle, they’re far from its only residents…

Review:

There have not been as many books I have anticipated on title alone as much as I have the latest Brian Asman book, Man, Fuck This House. This is the story about a family that moves into a haunted house, and using the haunted house trope, this title really reflects how a majority of people would respond as soon as some paranormal stuff started happening. I think about The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, the first season of American Horror Story, and even Haunted, I cannot help but think about how I would react if my family was in this situations. We would be leaving after saying, “Man, fuck this house.”

The story starts with the Haskins family moving from Columbus, Ohio to Jackson Hill, a small town in the southwest. They move into a Craftsman home and Sabrina, a ex-Hooters girl that is now a homemaker, thinks the house is perfect. Of course weird things start to happen. The house is haunting her but by doing things that help her. The house draws her a bath, moves boxes to the basement, and makes school lunches for the kids, nonviolent but definitely paranormal activities. Of course the house has an agenda, and at the end, the house shows all of it’s character to the entire town of Jackson Hill.

I have read all four of Brian Asman’s published books, and I can firmly say that this is the best one. His previous three books, especially his last, Nunchuck City, focus more on the plot and the action than Man, Fuck This House. Asman takes the first half of this book to develop some characters and tension between them and the house. By the time the madness of the second half arrives, I was way more interested in the characters and the story outcome than in his previous novels. The development of the story is better than in his other books, but it does not lose a single bit of Brian Asman’s writing skills. I enjoy his books because they are very funny, a little absurd, and fantastically entertaining. Man, Fuck This House seems like this is a step up, like Asman has been sharpening his storytelling skills, without losing the vision for the stories that he has had since day one. This is why I will continue to read and recommend every Brian Asman book that he releases.