"The perfect haunted house story for these unnerving times."
--The New York Times Book Review
"A novel of elegant, poised assurance."
--The Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Eerily enticing."
--Entertainment Weekly
"A miracle of storytelling."
--The Charlottesville Daily Progress
"Laken reminds us of the risks Americans are willing to take to own their own home and how desperately they want to believe this will solve every problem."
--The Chicago Tribune
"Laken's artful dissection of the human psyche -- as starkly contrasted by the great divides of class and race -- compels the reader to take a deeper look into what truly constitutes happiness."
--The Detroit Metro Times
1/15/2010
Well, it's just two weeks till the paperback is released. So for those of you looking for a nice Valentine's gift in the $10-14 range for all the sweet antiquated readers in your life, now's your big chance. I for one am excited about the dreamy new cover. I'll be doing some guest blogs and other stuff in weeks to come, so keep an eye out. And until then, check out this FWR review of the coolest book I've seen in quite a while: We Are the Friction.
12/15/2009
The bad news: Kirkus Reviews appears to be closing shop. The good news? Before doing so, they were kind enough to name Dream House to their Best Books of 2009 list. Big thanks to whoever made this happen, and good luck to all the Kirkus folks in this transition.
10/20/2009
Hey, imagine this: Dream House just made Booklist's Top Ten First Books of 2009! Why, thank you, Booklist. It's nice to be in good company there with beautiful books like Nami Mun's Miles from Nowhere.
9/25/09
It's been a strange year. Most of the business of writing relies on a dangerous and probably unwholesome proclivity for holing up alone somewhere and tinkering away at a project you know may never reach or interest anybody. It's a pretty inward-facing enterprise. (When someone asked Nabokov who he imagined as his ideal readers, he said, "Lots of little Nabokovs.") So when you finally, after years of doubt and isolation and eye strain, finish the thing and have the crazy luck to see it published, you'd expect to feel a kind of Top-Of-Everest satisfaction, or at least a brief reprieve from your crippling doubts.
But you've gone public. Your private little project is now available to anyone, and you find yourself at bookstores and festivals reading from it to total strangers. This is about as exhilarating as you'd expect, but it's also terrifying. As my old teacher Charles Baxter used to say, you expect the Fraud Police to show up any minute.
I'm not complaining. Along the way, hundreds, maybe thousands of people have gone out of their way to do nice things for my book. From the friends who offered early feedback, to the wise folks at HarperCollins, to the reviewers and radio hosts and book sellers who gave it time and space, to the readers who recommended it to friends, I'm astonished and touched by the ways my private little dream of a book has bloomed into something with its own life, beyond my control.
They say no one reads any more, there isn't time for it. But here you are, holding on, holding out, supporting an art form built of just 26 letters that -- maybe more than any other -- bridges the gap between us.