Home is Where the Harm is: A Review of Joe Sacksteder’s Hack House by Lizzy Roth
Joe Sacksteder’s Hack House, published by Astrophil Press in 2024, is a living hive of action and reflection borne through the vehicle of a painting crew working on a historical family home. Told in multiple perspectives, Hack House is interspersed with vignettes from Sacksteder himself detailing his imagined exploration of the real Friend-Hack House. Sacksteder’s novel portrays conversations surrounding class, generational divides, and environmental justice. This is his third novel, joining Make/Shift and Driftless Quintet, and a myriad of publications in other collections. Sacksteder explores concepts of fragmentation and reconstruction in much of his work, to the benefit of readers of Hack House, who are able to see this expertise wielded with artful authority.
Our primary narrators are the employees of the Lotus Painting crew, working on the Losada family home amidst their own personal conflicts, exacerbated by the house’s composition as much as each other. We are privy to their thoughts, written in a form most suited to their internal narration. Text chains, maps, boat schematics, song lyrics, online reviews, pictures, and poems create a multimodal smorgasbord that gives depth to the story and the world the characters live in. Stu, the project manager for Lotus, took over the business from his father, Lee, and thinks in price estimates; spreadsheets intersperse his steadily dependable narrative. We see Stu as a distant presence, taken away from his work at Hack House to his ultimate benefit, allowing for his return when it is most needed.
Lee, who still hovers over the business as a reluctant drone, thinks in bitter fragments and speaks in creative expletives. His bitterness doesn’t fade, but he does become an agent for conveying one of the novel’s core concepts: we should not be careless, not in any circumstance. Carelessness leads to ruin, every time. Speaking of carelessness, a new hire, Mikey, provides a much needed outside perspective on the otherwise years-long relationships of the crew with his sans-serif tweets dancing along his plot. Originally a more traditional and therefore grounding force, Mikey falls under the influence of both his drug addiction and the house, placing himself and others at risk. Another vehicle carrying our careless message.
Dieter is a struggling musician when outside of work, and much of his narration fixates on the songs he composes self-consciously where no one else can hear. Eventually, Dieter’s inner frustrations turn to violence–first against himself, then against others, as he questions his agency and the nature of violence. His perspective is from one side of a class divide that becomes more apparent as the novel progresses, growing into the root of many of the problems that drive our crew to madness.
Curtis is the only workaholic of the group, thinking in fragmented steps that he must follow, narrating his progress and his outlook until he becomes too caught up in the past to narrate the present at all. His fixation on the past–on choices he wishes he made–becomes life-threatening as the house does its work on the crew while they work on it. Pete is our literary Civil War buff, Stu’s longtime friend, and gives us ample fragments of history as he narrates the crew’s initial shenanigans. Pete has been, unlike Curtis, able to move on from his past in some respects, but lingers on missed opportunities that become a fixation of their own.
We also get to see the narrative from the perspectives of the residents of Hack House, the Losada family. Franco, the patriarch, a beekeeper, and limply effective negotiator, narrates his family’s home being turned into a hive of painted activity in anxious spurts. His obliviousness to all other matters outside of his bees (and even those, he does not monitor closely enough), are a perfect representation of a stereotype that we have all seen of an upper-class well-to-do dad. He is our ignorant purveyor of hive-rot, to extend the metaphor he often references himself. His youngest son, Zander, is a perceptive kleptomaniac. Zander’s young, distant, and sporadic narration is a break from the typical tone of the novel in intriguing small sections. Though his sections often seem nonsensical, we are alerted to problems in the house first through Zander, a victim to both the crew and the family as they fall to their individual delusions. Dylan, the oldest, college-bound Losada son, likes to think through his spiralling relationship and future career in concussive news fragments. Elena, the primary breadwinner of the family, is our constant, but distant, voice of reason. She attempts to resign herself to the loss of her son to college, but instead must reckon with the possible loss of her husband and both children to their own psychoses.
As the rest of the characters, and their narratives, begin to spiral into chemically sinister hysteria, we are forced to take the fragments we have been given and paste them together ourselves into a framework that is most meaningful to us. Sacksteder leaves multiple comments sprinkled throughout the novel that lend themselves to look beyond the plot. How we make meaning for ourselves, he we struggle to move forward and look towards futures that seem too alien to our own, and how intention alters the effect of action are all explored throughout Sacksteder’s novel. Our characters live complex lives, taking the plot of scraping paint off of a house and delving into many of the socioeconomic factors that we, as members of a capitalistic society, have to be aware of today. Hack House also explores the nature of contagion and the allure of violence or anger as the circumstances around us change, crafting a timely conversation.
The prose is appropriately nuanced from an author who appreciates exploring the impact of fragments. Sentences rarely follow tradition. Chapters are named for characters and are often not dictated by plot-progression, but the priorities of the characters at the time, which becomes increasingly difficult to parse as their condition–gifted by the house and its illicit past–worsens. We are expected to closely insert ourselves into this narrative, put the pieces together for ourselves, take the flaws that we see in these characters and explore the limits of our sympathy as well as the assignment of blame.
I am always hunting for a challenging next book, and this suspenseful, humorous, and horrifying novel is exactly what I needed.
If you are interested in purchasing a copy of Hack House, or hunting down more of Sacksteder’s work, you can find his web site at https://www.joesacksteder.com/.