Haunted Houses

by Lynne Tillman

  —PETER STRAUB

  “Tingly, crisp, and wry… Delightfully clever and probing.”

  —DONNA SEAMAN, Booklist

  “Tillman’s evocation of Horace and his life among ruins both geographic and aesthetic is a tour de force. Cast in Doubt recasts every genre it touches—the expatriate novel, the mystery, the novel of ideas—like a multiply haunted house of both form and identity.”

  —Voice Literary Supplement, Best Books of 1992

  “If you can keep up with him, Horace will take you all kinds of places… I was unwilling to close the cover and break the spell. I turned the book over and started over again.”

  —Boston Phoenix

  “A private eye in the public sphere, [Tillman] refuses no assignment and distils the finest wit, intelligence and hard evidence from some of the world’s most transient artifacts and allegories. This is a truly memorable book.”

  —ANDREW ROSS

  No Lease on Life

  The New York of Lynne Tillman’s hilarious, audacious fourth novel is a boiling point of urban decay.

  The East Village streets are overrun with crooked cops, drug addicts, pimps and prostitutes. Garbage piles up along the sidewalks amid the blaring soundtrack of car stereos. Confrontations are supercharged by the summer heat wave. This merciless noise has left Elizabeth Hall an insomniac. Junkies roam her building and overturn trashcans, but the mean-spirited landlord refuses to help clean or repair the decrepit conditions. Live-in boyfriend Roy is good-natured but too avoidant to soothe the sores of city life.

  Though Elizabeth fights on for normalcy and sanity in this apathetic metropolis, violent fantasies threaten to push her over the edge. In vivid detail, she begins to imagine murders: those of the “morons” she despises, and, most obsessively, her own.

  Frightening, hilarious, and wholly addictive, No Lease on Life is an avant-garde sucker-punch, a plea for humanity propelled by dark wit and unflinching honesty. Tillman’s spare prose, frank, poignant and always illuminating, captures all the raving absurdity of a very bad day in America’s toughest, hottest melting pot.

  “Confirms and enhances her reputation as one of America’s most challenging and adventurous writers.”

  —Guardian

  “…should be awarded a special Pulitzer for the most perfect use of the word ‘moron’ in the history of the American novel.”

  —FRAN LEBOWITZ

  “A book anyone concerned with urban life, women, or American culture, as it stumbles into the 21st century, must read.”

  —SAPPHIRE

  “Exquisite… To encounter a writer of Tillman’s acute intelligence writing as well as this is a cause for real celebration.”

  —Independent (UK)

  “Tillman describes much of the wearing, wearying routine of the city’s daily life—all that garbage, all those druggies and creeps and whores we’ve met in a million Letterman one-liners jammed into a scrawny crevice of land while the rest of America’s so huge and airy and free. But Tillman’s book is utopian precisely because it takes those things into account; because its heroine fantasizes about murdering all ‘the morons’ not out of hate, &‘squo;but dignity and a social space, a civil space, actually civilian space.’…[Tillman] sprinkles the text with dozens and dozens of jokes… Who can’t relate? Isn’t every public-transportation-riding, rent-paying, law-abiding urban dweller about two or three knock-knock jokes away from homicide?”

  —SARAH VOWELL, Salon

  “Richly surreal…yet darkly humorous…Tillman demonstrates her wit, superb observational skill, realism of representation, and verbal eloquence…No Lease on Life is a meditation on the realness and the ridiculousness of daily living. Yet again, Tillman tackles issues on her terms, freshly reshaping traditional literary forms.”

  —DONNA SEAMAN, Booklist

  “We first meet Elizabeth sitting at the window of her East Village apartment at 5 a.m. spinning gruesome revenge fantasies about the noisy hoodlums in the street… this novel [is] graced by flashes of bilious wit, a series of funny, inconsequential jokes and an appealingly loopy milieu.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “As energetic and raunchy as a New York street.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A terribly up-close and personal examination of urban angst and fury. It is also a funny, frightening, and utterly brilliant tour de force.”

  —Bay Area Reporter

  “Darkly humorous… [the] New York that one doesn’t see on Seinfeld.”

  —Library Journal

  “In a society that increasingly deals with the unbearable by cleaning ‘it’ up, by sweeping the streets and parks of the homeless and addicted, and/or stashing ‘it’ away (in ghettos, prisons, etc.), No Lease on Life provides a straight-on view and acknowledgment of the unbearable, if not an acceptance. What Elizabeth collects keeps her from sleeping, drives her to thoughts of murder, and yet ‘she [has] to be open…like a window…sometimes transparent, usually paradoxical, and always open to tragicomic views of life.’”

  —ELISABETH SHEFFIELD, Review of Contemporary Fiction

  Someday This Will Be Funny

  The stories in Someday This Will Be Funny marry memory to moment in a union of narrative form as immaculate and imperfect as the characters damned to act them out on page. Lynne Tillman presides over the ceremony; Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and Madame Realism mingle at the reception. Narrators—by turn infamous and nameless—shift within their own skin, struggling to unknot reminiscence from reality while scenes rush into warm focus, then cool, twist, and snap in the breeze of shifting thought. Epistle, quotation, and haiku bounce between lyrical passages of lucid beauty, echoing the scattered, cycling arpeggio of Tillman’s preferred subject: the unsettled mind. Collectively, these stories own a conscience shaped by oaths made and broken; by the skeleton silence and secrets of family; by love’s shifting chartreuse. They traffic in the quiet images of personal history, each one a flickering sacrament in danger of being swallowed up by the lust and desperation of their possessor: a fistful of parking tickets shoved in the glove compartment, a little black book hidden from a wife in a safe-deposit box, a planter stuffed with flowers to keep out the cooing mourning doves. They are stories fashioned with candor and animated by fits of wordplay and invention—stories that affirm Tillman’s unshakable talent for wedding the patterns and rituals of thought with the blushing immediacy of existence, defying genre and defining experimental short fiction.

  PRAISE FOR LYNNE TILLMAN

  “Both entertaining and unnerving… If fiction is a mirror that shows the life and slime of our times, then this writer has her finger on the wavering pulse of our century at its closing.”

  —Time Out on No Lease on Life

  “Lynne Tillman has always been a hero of mine—not because I ‘admire’ her writing, (although I do, very, very much), but because I feel it. Imagine driving alone at night. You turn on the radio and hear a song that seems to say it all. That’s how I feel…”

  —JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

  “One of America’s most challenging and adventurous writers.”

  —Guardian

  “Like an acupuncturist, Lynne Tillman knows the precise points in which to sink her delicate probes. One of the biggest problems in composing fiction is understanding what to leave out; no one is more severe, more elegant, more shocking in her reticences than Tillman.”

  —EDMUND WHITE

  “Anything I’ve read by Tillman I’ve devoured.”

  —ANNE K. YODER, The Millions

  “If I needed to name a book that is maybe the most overlooked important piece of fiction in not only the 00s, but in the last 50 years, [American Genius, A Comedy] might be the one. I could read this back to back to back for years.”

  —BLAKE BUTLER, HTML Giant

  Copyright © 1987 by Lynne Tillman.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tillman, Lynne.

  Haunted houses / by
Lynne Tillman

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-935869-09-2

  I. Title

  PS3570.I42 H3 1987

  813/.54 19

  86-25156

  Cover design by Charles Orr

  RED LEMONADE

  a Cursor publishing community

  Brooklyn, New York

  http://redlemona.de

  Version 1.0

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part II

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part III

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part IV

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part V

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Credits

  Further Reading

  Praise for Lynne Tillman

  Copyright