Bad Houses

A boisterous collection of surreal, darkly humorous short stories that will delight fans of George Saunders and Alice Munro

From John Elizabeth Stintzi, the mind that created the daringly bizarre novel My Volcano, comes an electrifying collection of strange and dark tales.

In the surreal, often precarious realities of Bad Houses, a doctor discovers a double-edged cure for the Ebola virus, a college student loses a different body part each time they return home for the summer, Midas’s hairdresser strives to keep his secrets, and a young girl develops a fascination with the trolls who harvest her father’s pumpkin patch. At once humorous and horrifying, these stories will inevitably take residence in your mind.

Present throughout Bad Houses is a deep and abiding sense of humanity sprinkled with a dash of alienation, guilt, and instability. Filtered through a fabulist lens, these stories contemplate the struggles of modern existence. Each character lives their own haunted life, trying to navigate the path from bad houses to good homes.

Featuring Stintzi’s own expressive ink illustrations, 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.

John Elizabeth Stintzi is an award-winning writer, cartoonist, and editor. They are the author of the novels My Volcano and Vanishing Monuments, as well as the poetry collection Junebat. Their work has appeared in Ploughshares, TheMalahat Review, Kenyon Review, and Best Canadian Poetry. They live and work in the United States.