Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on April 18, 2023 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.
Rose/House is the latest novella from Hugo Winning author Arkady Martine (A Memory Called Desire). The novella is ostensibly a sci-fi locked room murder mystery - except the locked room is an Artificial Intelligence that comprises the setting itself, a strange house built by an eccentric/mad designor Deniau who passed away and locked it up for no one but his protege to see...except someone else has gotten in and died there. And so three main characters Detectives Maritza Smith and Oliver Torres (investigating the situation) and Selene Gisil, protege of Deniau, come to the house to figure out what happened.
In the end, it's less of a murder mystery (although more of a horror novel) than a combination of a lot of ideas - of mentorship and training and trying to get away from one's shaping, of how we envision ourselves (whether that be humans or AIs) at any given moment, at desires and what people want with Art and what Art truly is, and more. Does it work as a coherent story whole? That I'm a little less sure of.
More specifics after the jump, although please be aware that I read this like two weeks prior to writing this review, so I'm gonna be a bit more vague.
Plot Summary:
Architect Basit Deniau was renowned for his famous and incredibly built - incredibly as in unbelievable - houses, all of which were haunted. Rose House was his last work and where his ashes were interred, with its AI instructed by his will only to allow Basit's former disciple Selene Gisil in one week a year to visit...and no other humans inside. For Selene, this permission is a curse, as she once tried to get away from Deniau's influence but finds she can't quite stay away forever from Rose House, even as she's repulsed by it. But for others out there, Rose House is a curiosity that represents something more...something that they want to have.Thoughts: Rose/House is less really a noir or locked room murder mystery than a sci-fi gothic horror novel, with the venue Rose House being the location for the horror. Here is a place that people want for their own reasons - whether for Art, whether to duplicate the AI, whether for other greedy ambitions - and others at the same time want desperately to get away from it like Selene....and can't.
And then the local police department, home to Detectives Maritza Smith and Oliver Torres, gets a call from Rose House itself to report a dead body within it. A dead body that seems impossible - how could it have gotten inside - and which Maritza becomes determined to investigate. But even with Selene's help, how can she get inside? And if she does, what will she discover within?
Oliver and Maritza simply want it to make sense of course, and want to get answers for the murder and who is really after the things in Rose House. But this horror doesn't want to give it to them and won't simply comply with that desire. And the story does so in a way that asks a lot of questions about one's identity as a person vs an idea (Maritza at times represents the police department...and then more lethally represents a person for example) and how one can get away from a seemingly abusive mentor/mentee relationship like that of Selene and Deniau - which Selene cannot...and well there's more questions here as well.
It's a pretty fascinating and confusing story as it ends in a classic horror filled way where people have more questions that answers and wind up more shaken up than anything else. I'm just not sure if it all super works for me?
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