Bad Houses – John Elizabeth Stintzi

[Arsenal Pulp Press; 2024]

John Elizabeth Stintzi (they/she) illustrated the cover art for their recent short story collection Bad Houses: two anthropomorphized houses—one with hulkingly muscled arms, one with grimacing beard-like shrubbery and brows furrowed angrily over its window eyes. Stintzi drafted the illustration on large A3 paper with a brush pen, giving the lines a simultaneous clarity and feathered coarseness that produces a beguiling and unnerving little neighborhood scene, white picket fence included. It both invites and repels. It feels like a place I recognize and am not sure I want to return to, so much so that I wonder if Stintzi and I both grew up watching the same Adult Swim shows. Each of the stories, too, opens with a fittingly ominous, cryptic, or wacky ink illustration. (For more of Stintzi’s visual storytelling, I highly recommend reading their mini-comic “The Children of Gulga-Krü,” which broaches existential questions of cosmic belonging through the endearing perspective of an alien loner.)

The stories in Bad Houses mirror this expressive, bombastic, slightly ominous comic quality—they are as much invitation as they are warning. The back copy even says so:  “Bad Houses is a book that feels like it was penned by a trans Alice Munro mixed with a bubblier Franz Kafka. Enter if you dare.” I couldn’t agree more. Stintzi fuses insightful character interiority with intense feeling, whether it’s euphoria or sorrow, in outsized, mind-bending premises. In so doing, Stintzi joins the good company of many authors—from Andrea Lawlor to Helen Oyeyemi to George Saunders—whose work resists the contrived distinction between literary fiction and the conventions of genre fiction. But more specifically, I might describe the vibes of this book as a mix between beloved Canadian trans writer Casey Plett and underground cartoonist Mark Newgarden.

Stintzi’s is a collection of bizarre, surreal tales that take many angles on being haunted by homes. Though the narrative conceits might flirt with caricature, the characters within them feel painfully real. Stintzi has a miraculous capacity to get at the emotional meat of something like suicidality or childhood attachment trauma or the minutiae of lesbian sex negotiations, even with playful spookiness and uncanny fabulism.

Malicious houses range ferally throughout the collection. In the opening story, “Dumb House,” somebody’s roommate inexplicably transforms into a mime, painting her face white one day, ceasing to speak, and struggling with invisible enclosures and obstacles. The house they share begins to close in on them, or close them out. The mime dies by a kind of suicide inflicted upon her by invisible forces, so cried-out that her face is a “simple slate of black,” no white face paint, all black tears. It’s a startling, crushing death—and it isn’t even the one that got me the most.

Just as the houses threaten their inhabitants or neighbors, so do the experimental conceits. Stintzi might begin a story by literalizing a metaphor, as in “Elephant,” in which the elephant in the room is not only something unspoken but is an actual elephant—a dead one—splayed out on a couple’s queen sized bed in their tiny studio apartment. Or Stintzi might begin by re-casting a mythologically misty narrative into a recognizable contemporary context, as in “Midas’ Hairdresser,” which depicts the hairdresser as Midas’ increasingly burdened keeper of secrets.

But Stintzi takes the premises of their stories so seriously, and develops their characters so devastatingly, that you forget you began with a metaphor. You forget that you’re in a world contrived of word play. The dead elephant in “Elephant” is beginning to rot, and the couple has to figure out the awful logistics of hacking apart a several-ton, maggot-y animal and hazmat-suiting their way to a liveable home, or else abandon it, and each other. After laughable avoidance, the two end up working side by side: “Together they cut large chunks of bad flesh off the flanks, the rump, the throat, and carried each piece down to the curb on a stretcher made of bedsheets bound between the broom and the coat rack.” But in their renewed partnership, they also risk dismantling their entire apartment—everything looks like wreckage.

Other stories treat the homes (literal and/or metaphorical) in childhood, romance, gender, and even online persona. The story “Which House” opens with an unsettling confession: a man’s girlfriend, as they are finally breaking up for the last time, says, “I didn’t want to have sex every time that we did.” This information destabilizes and haunts the unnamed protagonist; he no longer trusts the foundation upon which his identity as a good person rests. On one plane of the story, the protagonist experiences a very realist trajectory of abandoning his life to teach English abroad, and then returning to Canada to work long days up north for a mining exploration company. On another plane of the story, he is psychologically haunted and physically hunted by one of the collection’s several animate houses. This house is some chaotic combination of siren, witch, and portal. The house catfishes him on a dating app, traps him inside, and ghost-of-Christmas-pasts him through his bad relationship. 

This conceit sounds absurd—and it is. This story was, for me, the most profound experience of Stintzi’s power because it is exactly that absurdity that set me up to be crushed by the sudden gravity of genuine hope. “Which House” is a story of gender socialization and relationship power dynamics, of ancient suffering and ancient vengeance; it is also a story of futurity, of redemption. The man sets out to resist the world’s deeply gendered grooves that keep sliding him into the role of dominator. He tries to stop behaving the way the world has raised him to behave so that he can stop inadvertently hurting people. You really root for him.

The whole book oscillates dramatically between absurdist surrealism and the dead seriousness of trauma, forcing the reader to tightrope walk a psychological space of inscrutable realities, literalized metaphors, and the high emotional stakes of incredibly well-developed characters. You might think you are reading, for example, a delightfully bizarre riff on what feels like a mythical premise about a pumpkin farmer whose pumpkins are mysteriously harvested for him every year by a resident population of nocturnal trolls. And you might think this delightful, bizarre, folklore-adjacent story is about a girl (the farmers’ daughter) reconciling herself to her parents’ divorce through cutesy imaginative play. But then, quite suddenly, in the last few pages of the story, you start to suspect that the stakes are more severe and brutal than you understood: the trolls are very real, and they might be enslaved, and they seem to be starving to death. I’m describing the story “The Troll Patch,” which ends with one of the most haunting, inexplicable moments of terror in the collection . . .

The stories in Bad Houses span a kind of tonal spectrum that reaches on one end for the mythic and on another end for a wry, hyper-contemporary irony. In the story “Engagement,” an adjunct composition teacher hires one of their students to run their social media accounts, hilariously, as an “intern.” The protagonist loathes performing a self for social media— “being on Twitter and Instagram had started to feel like volunteering to be flayed” —and they gradually surrender more and more of their life to the intern to perform. The story is so twistingly funny that I thought, surely, there could be no funny turns left. But it keeps winding. “Engagement” is a short, concise piece that treats the demands of performing one’s own trans identity, online and off, with such caustic humor that I laughed some very sad laughs while reading.

The emotional resonance of the stories is this book’s great achievement. I was repeatedly surprised to feel so deeply the losses and hopes of these characters while delighting in what felt like such light-hearted wordplay. And, given that the real world feels increasingly surreal, the premises of Stintzi’s stories seem to more accurately access the acute sensations of being trans—or suicidal, or in a breakup, or at the heart of an evil empire—than being those things sometimes feels. That’s the inside-out tightrope-walk of almost every story in the collection: a funhouse world that threatens with every step to crush you.

Kasey Peters is a writer from Nebraska, with work in Pinch, Hayden’s Ferry Review, South Carolina Review, Blue Mesa Review, and others. A 2025 recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, winner of the Porter House Review 2023-2024 Editor’s Prize judged by Eliza Gabbert, and a 2022 winner of an AWP Intro Journals Award, Peters works as the editorial assistant for Zero Street Fiction, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press dedicated exclusively to LGBTQ+ literary fiction, and as Fiction Associate Editor at Prairie Schooner. Before all that, Peters farmed for a decade.