More House

Fiction. Two movies share a cast, a crew, and a set. More House, where Granny lives, and straight out of Victorian literature, is the scene of a Gothic period piece. In the other movie, The Lord wields his scepter over another cast of characters including the cook, the butler, the groom, and the maids. Meanwhile, the Girl and her son, Joey, move uneasily between the overlapping, and sometimes fusing, scenarios. Dark, erotic, disturbing, MORE HOUSE is an exuberant display of imagination and wordplay, and showcases an impressive new writing talent. "For a generation of skeptic believers, a new sort of novel, the novel equivocal about its status as a novel. Like Lawrence Braithwaite's More at 7:30, Hannah Calder's MORE HOUSE displays its 'more-ness' right in its title, and lives up to that promise in sequence after sequence of cinematic sweep and ambition. We used to say, everything but the kitchen sink, but Calder gives us the kitchen sinks of two centuries. In the main story of Joey--discontent in death as in life--and his mother--bent forever to her job, like the mother in Intolerance--Calder's prose simmers with hallucinatory heat. She is the most generous and attentive of writers, and one whose experiments crackle and blaze like wildfire, sweeping the landscape of her dreams like panopticon pinlights"--Dodie Bellamy.