It should be well known at this point that I love haunted house stories. Arkady Martine’s new novella, Rose/House is no exception to this.
In China Lake, California, legendary architect Basit Desiau built his masterpiece. Rose House is an advanced artificial intelligence that is fully integrated into the entire structure of a solitary house built out in the desert, some distance from the town proper. The locals refer to it as a haunt, as the AI within Rose House permeates through the whole building.
There is a dead man inside Rose House. That has been true for a year. Desiau arranged for the house to take the carbon that remained in his body after his death and compress it into a diamond, which the house then put on a plinth for display. In that respect as well, Rose House has always been haunted.
Now, though, there is another dead man inside Rose House. That shouldn’t be possible, as the only person in the world who was supposed to be able to access the labyrinthine house and its collection of Desiau’s archived work was on the other side of the world when he died. Dr. Selene Gisil, a former student of Desiau’s, is the only living person allowed inside Rose House. Her permissions, set by Desiau before his death, are to ensure that she remains the sole human caretaker of his notes and unpublished works. Despite having publicly distanced herself from Desiau before his death (and diamond-ification), Gisil is still the person he wanted to serve as seneschal.
Twenty-four hours have passed since this mysterious man died, and so Rose House has fulfilled its obligation by notifying the China Lake police precinct, in accordance with its programming guidelines. In order to get inside to examine the decedent, Detective Maritza Smith must track down Gisil and convince her to come back to the United States. There’s no one else that Rose House will allow inside, dead body or no. But who is the victim? How did he get inside Rose House to begin with? What is really happening out in the middle of the Mojave?
This is the first of Arkady Martine’s works that I’ve read, and I was very impressed with my first foray into her writing. Rose/House is a tight, tense narrative with little room for embellishment that you typically encounter in similar, albeit longer, works. All of our narrators get a little time to shine, and will leave you questioning what any of them really saw or did. I’ll definitely be looking into A Memory Called Empire in the near future if this book is at all indicative of Martine’s writing. My utmost thanks to Tor and to NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for a fair review. Rose/House is out in the world in hardcover tomorrow, 3/11/25. Go grab a copy, and let it grab you.
The Swords of the Ancients 