This book will definitely suck you in and confuse you. This is a twisted gothic tale that is crafted to confuse you. However I was not a fan of the switching narrations, it definitely got frustrating and confusing, but after you get the hang of it, it's not that bad.

This was a great effort for a creepy Southern Gothic read; however, it was too vague for my liking. The more I read, the more past and present times were mixed up, and it was difficult to tell who was narrating, and what part of their past was being referred to. As others wrote, it could use more merciless editing. This could have been a great book, and it did stay with me awhile after I’d finished reading. If you like creepy ghost stories, you would most likely enjoy this one. Rated this 3-1/2 stars.
Thank you to Mr. Broyles, the publisher, and Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

The House of Dust by Noah Broyles is an amazingly brilliant, original psychological thriller/horror story. The novel follows a non-linear timeline reverting and forth between the past and current times through the narrator, Brad. I, personally, got a little lost in the back and forth until about halfway through the book and at that point all the stories began to fall into place and the characters and the times in which they lived all started to fall into place and make sense. I struggled in the beginning, thinking, "I am having such a hard time understanding what is going on, I can't follow this". In all honesty I wanted to put the book down, but the story pulled me in so hard that I had to stick with it to find out what exactly was going on.

The beginning of the novel starts off by telling you that Brad, the narrator, is dead and this is his last literary piece. He is a true crimes writer for a popular magazine called Southern Gothic. The first few chapters you find out that Brad is having a huge mental breakdown. A lot is being stacked on top of him all at the same time, more even than he thinks he can bare. He is travelling through the south trying to get inspiration for his next true crime article when he stumbles upon an eerie rural town in the middle of nowhere Tennessee named Adamah. At this point, the reader is drawn into a rabbit hole that twist and turns and becomes so tangled that you begin to question if you are still reading the same book or if it got tangled with another book during printing (it gets that wild).

I didn't grasp what was going on until middle way through the novel, as I've stated. I urge you, the reader, to keep reading even though you may be confused. This confusion is an amazing literary tool that Noah Broyles has used to suck you into the vortex that is The House of Dust. Noah has created an amazing way to help the reader mentally feel the confusion and desperation the characters within the novel feel. I have only ever read one other novel that was this immersive to me and that was House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewsky. Both novels create an immersive vortex that suck the reader in, and you just cannot stop reading because of how out of control the characters and the story become.

I am so glad I stuck with this story and didn't give up because it brings up the subject of mental illness and how important it is for every human being, no matter of age, to be able to communicate and express how they are feeling to others. All the characters within The House of Dust lived through some type of trauma and they never dealt with it. This causes confusion, anger, depression, and all kinds of feelings that the characters have a hard time communicating and, in the end, they end up lashing out because of it. Mental illness is a serious condition that must be dealt with. A person cannot let "the dust settle" on a past trauma because the trauma will still be there waiting for someone or something to "blow that dust" back off and that trauma resurfaces over and over again. I am so thankful to Noah Broyles sharing this story and bringing to light the danger of not being able to communicate and express your feelings and the aftermath of letting "the dust settle" on your problems.

Thanks to Netgalley and Inkshares publishing for an advanced copy for an honest review.

Southern gothic at its finest! I am shocked this is a debut novel. This book is atmospheric, disturbing, heartbreaking, and just beautifully done. I love the look into the dark past of Bradley and his wife. This book hits all the high notes which make the southern gothic genre just so memorable. This is a slow burn which adds to the overall claustrophobic feel to the novel. As a southern transplant myself, this book really touched on the mystery and beauty, fear, and strangeness that embodies the south. I loved this one and will definitely recommend it. Thank you net galley for this advanced copy.

Atmospheric, creepy and engrossing. An enthralling story, slow burning and complex.
Even if I think that some more editing would help I found it a fascinating story.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

A twisty, creepy Southern gothic horror that will leave you having to sit there in silence for awhile, letting it all sink in, after you've turned the last page. Some people call this story a slow burn. I'd say it burns at just the right pace. The tragic melancholy that stretches taut between two people when they can't escape their past digs under your skin as much as the bizarre goings on in the forgotten town of Three Summers.

How to describe this book, am not really sure, i did love the dark and dangerous vibe in this overall good creepy southern gothic. But the Multi timeline had me all different kinds of confused, i felt there was a mix up of characters in this one, but maybe it was just me i found it very hard to tell whos narrative i was reading, i found it to be very complexing. I did enjoy the writing style and even though i was confused at times, i was hooked for a portion in the middle, there was a lot of interesting things happening and even more interesting characters, once you got over the very slow burn. And i wasnt a fan of the conclusion, the pacing of the end was a bit dreary and just added more questions then any real conclusion. The best thing about this book is the southern gothic feel, if you have experience with this genre you may really come to like this charming piece of writing.

This is big chunk of a book. It took a long time to get through.
As I read, I could feel the melancholy of Edgar Allen Poe's influence on the writing. Along with the horror and thriller elements.
It took till halfway through, before I could truly understand the gist of the story.
A far-off town, forgotten by the world..laid back inhabitants and age- old rituals and practices.
There are 2 view points. One in the present and the other in the past. I preffered the narrative voice of the past..though the present narrative did pick up towards the end.
The last few pages almost summarises the entire story.
I loved the language, the lyrical prose and the picturesque descriptions.
The story wasn't that gripping as I was expecting and the ending seemed predictable.

I pick up just about any Southern gothic novel that crosses my path. I live in the South and love a novel set here, especially during a steamy, sultry summer. This one definitely didn't disappoint! In fact, this is one of the best ones I've read recently.

A true crime writer and his girlfriend move to a creepy, crumbling old plantation. The sense of dread settles in almost immediately. I will say that this is one where it helps to jot a couple notes on each of the character names and defining characteristics/issues/experiences. I realized that a few chapters in, and it made my reading much more enjoyable from there on out, since there are multiple plot lines that feature similar characters.

I feel like there isn't much I can say without giving away spoilers, but prepare yourself for a smoldering slow burn with series creepy energy. I didn't get too scared reading this, but on the "Books in the Freezer" scale (super scary books go in the freezer, somewhat scary ones go in the refrigerator, and not scary ones are room temp), this is a solid refrigerator read.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this advanced copy.

On one hand, The House of Dust by Noah Broyles is a descriptive, slow-burn horror depicting a haunted house in a haunted village, that all turns into a creeping evil. On the other hand, this is a story that outgrew itself, never quit landing a solid enough foundation to guide the readers through the twists and turns of the novel.

Decay and rot - physical and emotional - are at the heart of the story, making a perfect backdrop for a southern gothic novel. From the beginning, the setting is set up perfectly, long stretches of backroad framed by trees and a warped mansion, distorted by time and neglect. Broyles crafts his visuals well, drawing you into the setting until you feel every divot in the old, country road and hear floorboards creak. If creating an eerie and forbidding atmosphere was enough, The House of Dust would have been an unquestionable success. Unfortunately, there were mechanical issues throughout the story that detracted from the story and left me feeling unsatisfied.

House of Dust follows Brad Ellison and Missy as they settle into the forgotten town of Thee Summers. Like the town, our POV characters have their own secrets and tragedies but they’re buried under a dust of jarring period shifts and mishandled reveals. I wanted so badly to lose myself in the beautiful writing but kept getting getting pulled out my muddled storylines and characters that kept getting swallowed by their pasts and surroundings. Sometimes it seemed intentional, other times it felt things were lost in the tide of moving the plot forward.

I sat with this review for a long time because I couldn’t quite make up my mind about how I felt about this novel. The potential for an incredible and every story and here but it’s overshadowed by elements that maybe another pass at editing would fix. With that said, I give House of Dust a solid 3.5 stars.

Thank you to the author and netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

My thanks to Noah Broyles, Inkshares and Netgalley.
Wow!
This story was the best kind of messed up. I was genuinely creeped out!
I have no review for this. I've not even the words.

Thanks to Net Galley and the publisher for a copy of this book to review !

House Of Dust
by Noah Broyles

A beautifully haunting tale infused with mystery.

A crime journalist and a prostitute settle into an abandoned mansion in an oppressive rural area known as Three Summers. I was immediately hooked at the beginning which tells of a man in the process of committing suicide.

Reminiscent of John Langan's classic “The Fisherman”, “House Of Dust” takes readers on a segmented journey beyond convention.

Noah Broyles has created a modern literary classic in this prolific & intelligent Southern Gothic Mystery.

I feel really bad writing this, because I think this book actually has potential, but to me, this is not quite ready to be published -- it desperately needs a diligent, benevolently cruel editor who isn't afraid to weed through the prose as well as the plot.
When it comes to horror, I'm all for a slow burn, but to pull this off, you need strong characters and/or an intriguing, cohesive plot. Both of these are missing here, IMO. We get to spend a lot of time following the two main leads around, but sadly we never get to really know them, because there isn't that much *to* know -- both of them are mainly defined by the Bad Thing/s that happened to them when they were young, and that's about it. It's all about their past, so much so that we never get to find out what kind of people they are *now* -- what do they like, what makes them tick, do they listen to certain bands or enjoy a particular kind of food, are they people you'd enjoy being around, do they ever laugh?!? They never jump off the page; on the contrary, they stay stuck in piles and piles of boggy prose. I found both of them fairly interchangeable in their constant confusion, neediness and passivity.
I also was not a fan of the split-level narrative of the first third or so; I'm sure the author was feeling quite clever about this little number, but for me it did nothing to help me along the way to understanding what was happening. Everything was just so muddled, I never really figured out what exactly was going on in Three Summers. Things don't really unfold, they simply plod along, much like the MCs, and a lot of the time I didn't feel like all those separate plot points actually came together; there is just *so much* going on, and not every idea gets fully played out. The book starts out as a haunted house story, then becomes a haunted village kind of tale and then, I don't know, segues into some kind of proto-cosmic terror thing with a side of folk horror and general modern-day malaise?
I realize this actually sounds kind of cool, which it might have been with some pretty ruthless editing. In its current form, it's just a big clunky grab bag of idea nuggets. There was all this weird stuff in the basement, and a presence too; there were what I read as makeshift kind-of-churches with scores of people "sleeping"/breathing in the ground (a big "huh?" for me every time one of these came up); there was a real church filled with people pretending to be asleep while sitting upright in their pews; lots of fragmented "aren't you just dying to find out?"-type flashbacks (dear God, I am SO over the daffodils); a spooky house with a spooky bathtub and a spooky ballroom and spooky dust and a spooky soil-filled bed; a town where for some reason life only starts up long after sundown; all those photographs of groups of people with their eyes closed; a cruel/abused/spooky boy who drops out of the narrative for chapters at a time; weird rites in basements; people getting buried alive all the time; an in-depth summary of Brad's "most famous article" that goes on for page after page and incidentally has nothing to do with the story whatsoever; a spooky movie theater with a singular inventory of weird movies, and we never get to find out who actually made those (or do we? I might have forgotten, because, well, there was a lot going on), and those are just the ones I can think of from the top of my head. A lot of these ideas would have made cool stories on their own, but piled up together like this it just becomes one big mess. Crucially, the whole idea of Adamah and the Queen of Hearts never fully came together for me, I still do not know exactly what was going on there some 450 pages later. Like I said, IMO this book needs a good, thorough editing.

Another thing that irked me were the "excerpts" from the MC's final article preceding every chapter. The vast majority of these did nothing to shed light on or add anything new to (or even had anything to do with) the events that followed them (think "If only I had known, I would have rushed home sooner" and similar chestnuts of the pseudo-dramatic variety), they were just pointless and to me looked like the author feeling too clever for their own good again. To top things off, we get treated to a full version of that same "article" at the very end of the book, with only minor variation, so we have to read it all. Over. Again. Why?!?
Also, the prose. For the most part, the novel reads just fine, but every now and then we swerve into regions that border on the purple: "Fuzzy moonbeams like pale roots reached blindly through the stuffy ceiling of clouds." "He heard the pain knocking in their voices and answered the door."
There were several instances where that feeling of WTF? took me right out of the narrative, especially when the author's obsession with eyes and pupils reared its weird head -- "she was rushing up from sleep, and her eyelids jumped apart. Darkness spilled into her pupils.", "Brad's pupils itched as he refused to blink." "Children's eyes were too deep; wells that time had not yet filled with trash." Pupils "expand like sudden sinkholes", eyes "darken to cave entrances", gazes are "avalanches", "yellow eyes" weep "trails of scrambling ants."
There were some instances of unintended hilarity, such as the assertion that it's only natural the local would-be writer would have piles of drugs at home: "as an aspiring author, he had to have some source of income." (I don't know, couldn't he have gotten some kind of, you know, *job*?) Also, the usual pitfalls of Trying Too Hard: "The children's eyes seemed not just deep, but dry. Faucets cut off from their water source. He could drop coins into those eyes and they would rattle down through their legs, into an underground labyrinth. A shared reservoir that could not be poisoned." Say what?! There's an "algae-colored" evening, as well as "dying daylight the color of peach ice cream melt(ing)" through a windshield. It got a bit perfume-y for me after a while, but maybe other readers like that kind of thing, I don't know.

Once again, this is not a bad book, but it could have been a really cool book, with some slight revisions and some ruthless cutting and some less sugary writing. As it is, I'm glad I got to read it, but all in all it was just okay.

Be prepared to travel the weird and wonderful, where nights are for living and days are covered in dust.

Brad and Jen move from Nashville to Three Summers, Tennessee, making a fresh start at Angel's Landing, an old plantation house. Little do they know that for centuries evil has kept its occupants hostage. Cycles of darkness emerge in the scorching heat of the sun.

The House of Dust is a feast for the senses. A captivating story that moves at perfect pace, is artfully crafted and extremely well written. The characters and their environment are vivid from the start. Never a dull moment.

Thank you Netgalley and Inkshares for the ARC.

I’m not going to lie. I couldn’t finish this book.

Horror, the genre claimed to be. Horror it is! It was far too creepy for me. Maybe it’s a mood thing right now? I’m sure if you love super creepy novels you will love this!

I grew up in the South. Not necessarily the backwoods country, dirt roads, and dead ends side of the South, but the South nonetheless. Even the most built up areas, one of which I was raised in, have rundown buildings with ivy roots running through them on the sides of the roads and secrets in the whispering sects of the community. No town here is big enough to miss the gossip and the rumors. I do have a bit of roots in the backends of the South, however, whether I want to own them or not. These are the areas where I learned what a whisper-warzone the church truly could be, what learning to drive a golf cart through single-stoplight towns is like, and what the power of social connection and belief can do for people who's strongest ties to one another are the church. They might even be responsible for the level of belief I hold, no matter how much it has shifted from the things I was taught.

Growing up as I did, I've always had an interest in the Southern Gothic genre. There are right and wrong ways to do it; ways that fail and ways that fly. Noah Broyles' House of Dust is one of the most successful I've encountered recently in terms of mood and atmosphere of a haunted town covered over with dust and secrets. It is a haunting effort that seeps under your skin and whispers into your subconscious that there, just on the edge of your sight, is something lingering in the shadows waiting to pull you in.

House of Dust tells the alternating stories of Brad Ellison, a true crime writer lured into the town by its mystery after tragedies of his own, and Missy Holiday, a former sex worker with a blood-spattered past of her own who follows her fiancée to the dilapidated town of Three Summers to try and be with him more in the face of his busy investigative work into the safety of the town's infrastructure. 

While it is possible to get a little lost in tracking which time period you're in until fairly late in the novel, especially given that Missy's fiancée goes unnamed for so long and the reveal of her time-ties to the house comes equally as late, I don't think it necessarily detracts from the experience. I instead read it more as a way of placing you out of time in the same way that the town itself feels detached from the linear experience. Everything melts together in the dirt, everything melts together under Adamah.

There's something irresistibly alluring about abandoned places. Growing up I always wanted to explore them through photography expeditions across the country. Not an original idea, to be sure, but the very fact that such a desire echoes in us all at one point or another speaks to their pull. Run down buildings of all sorts literally line the roads I ride through every day, left-behinds of the past with a history of their own buried beneath the vines that seek to swallow them. Broyles captures this spellbound feeling with apparent ease, propelling you along deeper into the story with the promise of secrets yet to be uncovered hidden in every well-crafted line.

Death lingers over the town of Three Summers and its inhabitants - whether they manage to escape it or not - as well as over every page of the story like sharp prickles of residue lingering just beneath the skin. The townsfolk here are intimately familiar with death and decay; how they respond to and feel about it is only a matter of interpretation. It is virtually impossible to discuss the plot at any length without treading into spoiler territory and, as this book will not unleash its lure on the world until September, suffice to say that the hold it takes on you is fierce and immediate.

Buried within House of Dust is a narrative device that acts as a trail of breadcrumbs for tracking your path that opens the novel to repeat readings long after you first wander the abandoned streets of Three Summers and encounter the mysterious Adamah. The Queen of Hearts within these pages may demand a sense of peace in her home, but you shall not find it in the restless nights of sleep Broyles' work is sure to induce.

House of Dust comes to haunt your dreams from Inkshare Publishers on September 28, 2021.

A huge THANK YOU to Inkshares and Netgalley for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

"The door swung open. Air shifted around them, drawn in across the threshold. The hall was a dry throat and all the unseen rooms back through the old mansion were collapsed lungs, filling with fresh air after how many strangled years?"

When crime writer Brad Ellison winds up in the small Tennessee town of Three Summers, he plans to end his life. His plan is interrupted when he comes upon a huge old house and its owner, an elderly woman, lying dead in the front garden. The town sheriff, Sorrel, asks Brad to lend his car as a hearse and quickly ushers him to the town's lonely church, wrapped in kudzu vines that eschew the other buildings. Witnessing a very strange and abrupt funeral for the woman, who is buried directly in the ground sans casket, Brad knows that Three Summers is his next big story for Southern Gothic Magazine, and it may be just the thing he and his estranged fiancée need to reignite their love story. We also follow Missy, a former prostitute who has seen more darkness than kindness in her short life and is drawn to Three Summers by her fiancé's promises of a better life. As she fixes up the decaying manor they've moved into, she is spooked by the behavior of her new neighbors and the black-eyed sheriff who keeps coming around.

This book is a slow burn, perfect for those lazy summer days when you have to stay indoors and out of the heat. The mysteries of Three Summers are terrifying and even as Brad and Missy inch closer to the truth, the reader begs them to leave while they still can. This is folk horror shot through with a classic Southern gothic atmosphere. Its opening pages are Lynchian, and the reader is drawn into the strange rituals Brad witnesses without explanation. You can practically feel the choking dust that permeates the house and coats the throats of all who come near...

I really enjoyed this book and the writer surprised me more than once, in a good way. I have a feeling I'll be thinking about this one for quite a while. If you like folk horror and cultish small towns, this is absolutely the book for you!!

Emotional and poetic, this book is guaranteed to satisfy those who love brooding horror stories. There were parts that I found wonderfully atmospheric and creepy. I value beautiful writing very highly, and this delivered on that front. The prose made me want to keep turning the pages just so I could savor the gorgeous language. Unfortunately, at times it also left me confused. However, I can still recommend it.

The House of Dust was a good read for those who like a good ole Southern Gothic story!

I enjoyed the book overall but found it hard to get into right away. Once far enough into it, the story picked up and showed it’s true colours. Creepy, mysterious and confusing are the key words I’d use to describe this book! Overall was a good read and I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys a gothic story!

Very creepy and haunting. The writing is very compelling and the characters were also quite interesting. I love how atmospheric everything was. This was very slow burn-y somehow, and sometimes it felt very word-y. It also got confusing sometimes. I think this is a very solid debut though, and would love to see more from the author.