Man, Fuck This House is a 2021 horror novella by Brian Asman. The story follows Sabrina Haskins, a disillusioned housewife who has just moved into a new home in a new town with her family—her husband Hal, who is a reverse mortgage salesman, and their two children Michaela and Damian. Desperate for a fresh start and something more from life, she is hopeful this change is exactly what she needs. However, as a strange presence starts making itself known within the house, Sabrina finds herself further losing her grip on reality, something which her precocious son Damian sees as an opportunity make mischief, invoking disaster and putting their troubled relationship to the ultimate test.

Sometimes, it doesn’t take a lot for something to grab my attention about a book, so it probably comes as no surprise that the reason I picked this book up was its title. It implied an audacious and knowing tone, that something about it would be genre-savvy and perhaps a little funny but with the hope that as the actual horror unfolds the reader will be inspired to feel the same way. Unfortunately, this book has become something of a lesson for me about judging a book by its superficial qualities. I don’t regret reading it by any means, and there is definitely some credit to the fact that I got through it in a single sitting without feeling strained. Nevertheless, it was well before the ending that I realized this book wasn’t going to be what I’d hoped.

I will say, I was fairly happy with Sabrina as the main character. She could be a little too gullible and cartoonishly hysterical at times, but there is a pathos to her dissatisfaction with life that made her easy to root for, and she is sympathetically at a loss about dealing with a seemingly haunted house. There are also undertones of everyday idiocy to her as a character that gave her a bit more substance; I don’t mean this in a way that makes her the butt of a joke or someone to look down on, more that it made her feel like a realistically average person—relatable but possessed with her own daft ideas and limitations.

This is starkly contrasted with her son Damian, who plays a big antagonistic role in the story and I found to be insufferable about 90% of the time. Essentially, Sabrina has troubled feelings about Damian because he absorbed his twin in the womb. Damian, a veritable boy-genius, picked up on these feelings at a young age and decided to feed into them by acting aloof and creepy whenever she’s watching him. I found this element of the plot really bizarre, as he’s unusually intelligent for a boy of barely 10, and the only reason for it is to justify the long con he is playing at. All of this resulted in a character whose first-person perspective is intolerably smug, as he views most everyone around him as idiotic and beneath him. This attitude was only ever balanced by the occasional superficial detail about how he still enjoys childish things (i.e., playing Fortnite and wearing SpongeBob pajamas).

These tensions eventually bring things to a head, as the atmosphere between Sabrina and the presence in the house becomes more ambiguous, even friendly, and the presence in turn starts to view Damian as a problem, since it sees the grief he is trying to cause his mother. Everything culminates in a three-sided mental/physical conflict between them, as Sabrina’s fear and distrust of her son’s nature clash with her instincts as an ultimately loving mother. I’ll not get into the fine details of how it all goes down, but it becomes quite the spectacle.

And though I did enjoy it as an audacious spectacle, another thought stuck in my mind throughout: this book is really stupid. Aside my problems with Damian’s role in the story, which were ultimately the biggest issues for me, what is really going on with the presence in the house, why it’s happening, and what it all results in at the climax are really dumb, my amusement while reading it notwithstanding. More than any other time I can think of, I felt like I was reading pulp fiction, though that’s only partly a critique; I will grant that it’s executed without a shred of pretension, which I respect, and I got the sense that Asman had a lot of fun writing it.

Final Thoughts

Man, Fuck This House is not the haunted house story I was hoping for. What it ultimately became was a lot more weird; this can often work in a story’s favour for me, but not this time. Though it had a pretty good main character and some decently spooky moments early on, Damian’s insufferable characterization and how important his perspective became to the story as a whole really dragged it down for me. On top of all this, it escalated to a ridiculous spectacle that was admittedly fun while reading, but upon reflection it was altogether more silly than impactful. It was a fun enough read, but it had too many problems.

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5