Rose/House is another incredible work of fiction from Arkady Martine. As a fan of her science fiction duology A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace, I had high hopes for this novella and I was not disappointed. The book centres around just a few characters, one of which is a seemingly sentient AI-powered house, only permitted to let one human enter it after the death of its (her?) creator. Yet another human has entered, and died inside that house. The novella follows two detectives who have to find the architect's former protegee to gain entry into Rose/House, and inside the house, everything is not what it seems. Martine builds tension throughout this locked-door murder mystery, with an artificial intelligence that might not be trustworthy and a protegee who might have been driven mad by Rose/House. The novella is satisfying in how it reaches an unresolved conclusion - Rose/House is left operating as it was, and the case of the murdered human is never closed. Martine does this really cleverly - Rose/House is so eerie that the reader, as with the detectives, wants to leave it alone. Ultimately, this is a novella about fear, deception, and toxic relationships, as much as it is about the inescapable creep of AI.

Rose House is more than just an AI house, it’s an architectural wonder. Since the architect died only one person, Selene, is allowed entry but Rose House rings the local precinct to say that there’s a dead man inside. Detective Maritza Smith must investigate. This was a clever and thoughtful read, a bit philosophical, a bit insane and also quite beautifully written. It could’ve been longer!

I love horror about AI and sentient houses so was super excited for this, it felt more speculative than horror, however the atmosphere and setting were incredibly creepy, the ambiguity also plays a big part in the uneasy feeling whilst reading, this isn't a straight forward sci fi thriller, it's more a commentry on consciousness and creation, overall i thought this was great, kind of like Shirley Jackson meets I Robot with a dash of agatha christie, the only downside would be the length! my full review will be posted on my spot on the blog tour!

3.5 stars rounded up!

Rose/House strangely feels like a haunted house story, though a deconstructed one has all the hallmarks while not relying on the tropes or stereotypes of the genre. Its main focus is on an AI program running the house of a late famous architect, isolated in the desert and closed off from the rest of the world. This program, named Rose House after the building, is very much the star of the show - picking up the stubborn and imperious nature of its creator, it toys with the human characters who underestimate its intelligence. Whilst I struggled to connect to any of the other characters over the short runtime, I can forgive the novella for this due to the chilling and intriguing development of the AI character itself.

I felt there was a fair bit of background noise to Rose/House which I felt made the story less sleek and focused. The story is arguably a rapid-fire murder mystery, with a body turning up in the house despite the fact its AI guardian denies almost everyone entry. I wouldn’t recommend the novella purely for the mystery though, since this storyline almost fades into the background in favour of understanding the house’s character. The same could be said for the shady businessmen, roving reporters and resentful heir to the house; the book felt cluttered with a lot of stuff going on that didn’t really resolve. The highs of Rose/House are great, and I just wish the story was a little more focused without all the other underdeveloped bits on the side. Thank you to Pan Macmillan and to NetGalley for an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review!

A novella-length homage to Shirley Jackson (Haunting of Hill House) with touches of William Gibson (three words: rogue Andorran hackers) and even Lovecraftiana (unnatural architecture that will drive you maaaaaaaaaad) that is absolutely slathered in portentious vibes and Martine's typically lovely prosody. Yet despite these promising ingredients Rose/House never really coheres into more than an evocative wisp of tone and style.

This is, of course, absolutely on point for a story about avant garde architecture and professional aesthetes, but it's not the kind of joke Martine seems to be aiming for despite the story's occasional flashes of referential humour*. There's a lot of ambition here, but I'm left feeling Rose/House might have been better either as a full book with enough time to unpack its many internal tensions, or a short story just coasting on impact. Instead, we've got just enough space to glue the aforementioned bundle of influences together with some wobbly worldbuilding, florid gothic style and Martine's authorial voice relentlessly (if effectively) horror-whispering at you how very uncanny and abreal everything is.

The problem is, if you look past that voice it's not clear if Rose/House's story stands up. Either Rose House is truly some kind of AI marvel (the kind of breakthrough regularly devised by...architects?) which the characters are improbably sanguine about, or the house is a reasonably normal part of these characters' world, if perhaps a bit unusual. The horror elements only really work if these supposedly late-22nd century characters are basically just stock 2020s humans, cops and robbers who are just fundamentally unprepared for the dangers of a world of nanobots and self-directed intelligence. It's easy to overlook this in the face of all that ominous prose, but once you see past Rose/House's one trick there's really only a trick of the light.

* A famous meme is literally acted out on page and I....honestly don't know what to feel about this.

I went into this with the wrong expectations, clearly, which is why I was so surprised at how short it was! It feels more like a short story than a novel, a musing rather than a complete piece of fiction. I would not class this as sci-fi, maybe speculative fiction.

Rose House itself is fascinating, an AI driven smart house that seems too alive, too human. I just think our visit was too brief to render any strong emotions regarding the fates of any of the characters. The mood building was well done though, I really felt the atmosphere of the desert and the creepyness of Rose House.

Thanks again to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this for free!

I'm taking part in the Blog Tour for this novella and received a copy via NetGalley to read in advance, thank you Pan Macmillan!

I was immediately sucked into this fascinating sci-fi novella and almost read it in one sitting. It retains an air of mystery throughout and even the end will leave you guessing - I know that's not everyone's cup of tea but I'm increasingly gravitating towards thought-provoking books that don't tie things up with a neat bow.

It begins with a death in an AI house - a rose-shaped glass AI house that's more of a living and breathing thing than what is usual in this world. The deceased creator of the house is therefore unsurprisingly notorious, as is the house which is the centre of this story. The state of technology in this alternate world/ future was so well-realised in such a small number of pages, and was slowly introduced rather than being introduced by any info-dumping. I truly felt that this was a realistic depiction of how life could be should AI become sentient.

As the local Police Station investigate the death we gradually meet more characters and points of view, each with their own distinct voice and Arkady Martine masterfully weaves in an air of creeping dread. I thought Detective Torres was an especially interesting character who I'd like to read more about!

That's all I'm going to say about the plot as I think it's best you go into this one blind, but I'd definitely recommend for anyone who likes speculative, creepy, twisty sci-fi. Coming in at around 120 pages it's the perfect read in between bigger tomes!

My review will be posted on Instagram during my stop on the Blog Tour on 19th March and will also be posted to Goodreads then.

Rose House lies in the middle of nowhere, deep in the Mohave desert. It was the crowning glory of the already-successful architect, Basit Deniau, because this wasn’t just stone and glass and sweeping curves: Rose House is alive. Every part of it is infused with state of the art AI, and the building… thinks.

Following the architect’s death, the house is locked to all bar one former student he has designated his ‘archivist’ – much to her bitterness, feeling her once-teacher is yet again controlling her and diminishing her own achievements. So when Rose House dials the local police force to report a dead body within its walls, Selene Gisil is not only the sole plausible suspect for Detective Maritza Smith to pursue, she’s also the only way Maritza is going to be able to get into the house to investigate.

The question is, who, if anyone, is going to come back out of Rose House…

The atmosphere in this book is outstanding – incredibly creepy, absolutely conjuring up the dry, dead desert, and the strangeness of the building in question. The sense of dread and dark things seeps from every page as the characters feel forced to play out their roles even against their better judgements.

The story that’s laid onto this setting is perhaps recognisable from elsewhere, popping up not infrequently in modern culture: AI going a bit… yeah o.O … and particularly the AI making a house dangerous, or even ‘haunting’ it. But even if the trope seems familiar, the way it’s handled here is excellent. There’s a real sense of ‘otherness’ to the AI, locked alone with itself since its creator’s death and following a twisting kind of logic. Maritza’s drive to do her job through what feels like a nightmare. Selene’s growing detachment from the situation she’s found herself overwhelmed by. The hints of backgrounds and years leading up to this one event come through impressively, in such a short offering.

If I have any complaints it’s perhaps the secondary characters that start to swirl about towards the end. It didn’t really need so much of the sense of a lot going on elsewhere, and I wasn’t sure some of these elements just landed a bit… much. Keeping things more contained might have helped the ending feel a little more satisfying.

But overall, I cannot fault the word-craft and the atmospheric telling. It’s such a cliché to say “I can see this being made into a movie” – but yup, totally could! And I would really love to see the architecture, the curves and twists, brought to visual life.

In short: a nicely chilling little tale of AI going wrong – in darker ways than just ripping off copyright all over the place! 😉

I do have the softest spot for books with sentient or magical houses, but not even that could help me here. I was very intrigued at first: an eccentric architect who turned himself into a diamond after his death left behind his famous AI embedded house. Only a single person is allowed and able to enter the house now, but one day the dead body of a stranger is reported on the property. The local police try to investigate, but that is of course difficult if the crime scene is out of reach. The premise hooked me for sure, but nothing about the execution lived up to that excitement. The writing was fine, but the story itself was not particularly well crafted in my opinion. I've never read a novella that progresses so slowly or offers that little of a plot. I guess you had to read between the lines to find the deeper meaning, but I got nothing out of it. It all felt very pretentious, but never actually provided commentary on the themes mentioned. The characters didn't save it either for they were basically empty shells, and one POV was straight up unnecessary. I really don't know what this book was trying to do, but I know that I didn't like it. (And I hate the fact that this is the first arc I ever got from Tor and that I have to give a low rating.)

Huge thanks to NetGalley and Tor for providing a digital arc in exchange for an honest review.

This is a quick little futuristic neo-noir novella. It's pitched as a locked room mystery but that's probably the least interesting, and most handwaved/glossed over part of the story. Rose/House sits firmly on the literary side of genre fiction and is really more of an exploration of art and architecture, consciousness and creation. It's very open ended and a touch unsatisfying if you go in expecting a straight scifi-thriller. Once I got into the rhythm of the writing, though - it gets a little (intentionally? satirically?) pretentious - I found myself hooked. The author managed to get me ridiculously invested in several characters given they only had ~120 pages to reel me in. I liked the buddy cop aspect; I liked the meddling reporter; I liked the fatalistically tragic devotees of architecture. It had a touch of F. Scott Fitzgerald that I was vibing with. I don't know that I could read a whole novel in this affected writing style but for a stylized novella, it really worked for me!

A pitch perfect creepy thriller, that leaves as many questions as answers, but in a very satisfying way. Rose house is imbued with an AI - *is* an AI. With its sole occupant - its architect and owner - long dead, and the house locked up, Rose House reports to the police that there is now a dead body inside.

The only person that Rose House has allowed inside is Dr Selene Gisil - an ex-pupil and now archivist of the long dead architect. Detective Maritza Smith gains entry on a fragile technicality in order to investigate the dead body.

The story is tensely claustrophobic. The AI that is Rose House is omnipresent, and the story has constant jeopardy, as the trustworthiness, capability, and motivation of Rose House itself are unknown - and there is a sense of unhinged wry amusement in the way that Rose House appears to toy with Maritza, whose presence in the house seems only tolerated through a tenuous and potentially malevolent curiosity.

Some aspects of the mystery are uncovered, others are skirted around or hinted at, and at the end of the story there is very little resolution. This is partly, or largely, due to the novella length of the book. This lack of resolution may not be to everyone’s taste, and it would be possible to complain that the story should have been given a more full, novel length treatment - and there is certainly scope to do so. But for me, those things left unsaid were satisfyingly tantalising, and I wonder whether fleshing out the details of those things that have only been roughly sketched would have moved it into the mundane.

Thank you #NetGalley and Pan Macmillan Tor for the free review copy of #RoseHouse in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Unfortunately, this novella didn't work for me at all: I was cautiously hopeful for a second chance with the author's writing, after being disappointed by the Memory Called Empire, but I feel this novella shares a lot of the same shortfallings that put me off Arkady Martine's novel previously. As was the case with Teixcalaan books, the premise and the set-up are compelling, promising a smart chewy story to follow, but the execution doesn't live up to it on idea level or on sentence level. Rose/House has a very Asimov-style neo-noir premise: a haunted house with a terrible AI personality, a legacy an insane genius architecht, a locked room murder mystery, America of the future century, a couple of disillusioned cops. Execution? A lot of exhausting, mediocre poetry at line level, complete with interrupted syntax and a criminal overuse of the word stucco, too many viewpoints for such a short story, a handwavy depiction of Big Ideas, which are not that big to begin with, and general incoherence that doesn't even read like moody and atmosphere-creating to me. It scans like tiresome posturing with no intellectual or emotional reward for the time spent with it. I think, with this, I will conclude that Arkady Martine's books are not for me, and will let others enjoy them without any FOMO.

This book felt a bit like a fever dream, but in a good way! I really liked the setting and the atmosphere, as well as the imagery. Arkady Martine did a really good job at building up an incredible sense of dread and I was genuinely creeped out and uncomfortable for parts of the book. The imagery in the writing was also fantastic: I could perfectly visualise the house and its harsh beauty. It made me feel very immersed, which really added to that build up in tension. The dialogue from the house was also exsquistely creepy, I really got a feel for its personality and its tangled motivations. The amount of worldbuilding Martine managed to pack into such a short book without it feeling infodump-y was also really impressive. Nothing felt fake or over-the-top, it was all natural and genuine and I honestly wouldn't be surprised if our future ended up looking like this!
However, after all of this excellent build up, I was left a little unsatisfied by the ending. It felt like the book just sort of ‘stopped’ and there was a bit of an anticlimax. I wanted a bit more from the story. The characters also suffered a little from the short page count- I felt like I didn’t really get to know them all that well. This meant that certain reveals and twists didn’t quite land as they should have. I think this just could’ve benefited from being a bit longer and more developed.
Despite the anticlimax, I did still enjoy the atmosphere and tension overall. I do really love experimental science fiction and I'll be checking out more by this author in the future! Look out for this one if you want a creepy, atmospheric, multilayered and dream-like sci-fi story!

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the review copy. I picked this one up as I loved the author's other work, however this novella did not leave as strong an impression in comparison. I think the author did a fantastic job in terms of atmosphere and I did like the way that the Rose House AI was presented. However I feel like overall the novella did not work for me as an overall story, and the ending did not feel very satisfying.