Rose/House is an interesting take on the locked room murder mystery set amidst heady sci-fi topics of AI and what the definitions of humanity and legacy mean in its growing presence.

Detective Maritza Smith receives a call from the artificial intelligence at nearby Rose House, the design masterpiece of a deceased architectural genius, informing her that there is a dead man inside the home. Detective Smith is aware that the architect is enshrined as a diamond within Rose House, but it is clear that the AI refers to a new corpse. One that should not be there since only one person is permitted to enter Rose House, and she has a solid alibi.

Detective Smith manages to gain entry to Rose House by denying her humanity and assuming the identity of the police precinct. Her experiences inside the house are very surreal and reminiscent of gothic literature. Her partner, Detective Torres, meanwhile attempts to provide support from outside Rose House and finds himself enmeshed in the tropes of the noir genre.

This was an interesting and thought-provoking read, but it didn't quite hit the mark for me with regards to either the mystery or sci-fi genres. I think because I did not fully grasp the motivations at play that I was not able to appreciate the resolution of the mystery. I appreciated the experimentation with the genres and thought that the future world which the story was set was both interesting and compelling.

Maybe I'm too literal of a reader. The "soaring, crystalline" prose that the cover promises just gives me a headache. It felt like all the characters but one spoke and thought the same way, including the house.

An unsatisfying novella to finish, but an interesting one to be inside of, not unlike Rose House itself.

Rose/House by Arkady Martine was such eerie and hauntingly good novella. I read it so slowly because I wanted to relish in how good it was. It's creepy, atmospheric and delicious. I think Arkady Marine is a brilliant writer and I cannot wait to read everything she publishes.

This book did a great job at creating an eerie atmosphere! The house was very spooky and the narrative also explored what it means to be human or have consciousness, and what it means to have wants and desires.

Genre: speculative fiction, science fiction, postmodern mystery

All of renowned Architect’s Basit Deniau’s houses are haunted. But his final design, Rose House, is the best, and also the most haunted. A couple hundred years into the future, most architecture has Artificial Intelligence integrations, and Rose House is no exception…other than that its AI seems to have evolved into making intelligent decisions. Maritza Smith of the China Lake police precinct gets a call on the tipline from the house itself about a dead body on its premises. Maritza opens an investigation, but discovers she cannot access the house without Dr. Selene Gisil, Deniau’s protege.

Rose/House is an interesting novella. For just over a hundred pages, it has a lot going on: there is a murder of course, and the mysteriousness of the house as the basic plot. But this is focused more on ideas than plot. It’s an unsettling approach, and yet I think it works well. There is critique on the concept of narrative, on the limits (or lack of limits) on AI, and on the limits of personal agency. As someone who has worked in architecture for over thirteen years, I appreciated some of the subtexts that felt like design vs Design and architecture vs Architecture (or the practical versus the highbrow). I’ll be recommending this novella to all of my colleagues, for sure!

Don’t discount the page length on this one - I found myself needing to reread parts of it to try to understand it. I’d strongly recommend this one to those who like their science fiction to edge more towards speculative and that makes you think after reading. Rose/House isn’t a new favorite, but I’ll be thinking about it for a while and certainly plan to reread it.

The haunt... Rose House is haunted. Not by ghosts, or the dead man who created it and now sits as a diamond, all humanity compressed into a single gemstone, and not by the second dead man who is not supposed to be there. Rose House is haunted by itself. It is the haunt. It is Rose House.

This is a fantastic novella and one of my favourites of all time. Creepy, chilling, intriguing, and speculative, I gobbled it down in a single sitting and found myself immediately wishing for more. It's a haunted house in the future, haunted by its own artificial intelligence. What an incredible concept, and such incredible execution. A fabulously creepy writing style, a wonderful portrayal of an AI, and an ending that will leave you starving for answers... What are you waiting for, an invitation? Rose House does not invite visitors.

Rose House is the creation of radical architect Basit Deniau, run by an AI. A real, opinionated, arrogant AI. Maritza Smith is the tired, disillusioned police detective in China Lake, somewhere in the American southwest, who takes the call from Rose House when, as required by law, it makes the call to report that there's a dead body inside it.

Well, another dead body inside it. Deniau's corpse, transformed into a diamond, has been there for a year, ever since his death. The only living person allowed inside is Dr. Selene Gisil, his former protègè, later critic, and now, unwillingly, archivist of his his records and memorabilia. Even she's only allowed in seven days a year.

But at the moment, she's in Turkiye. Who is the dead body? Who is the killer?

One might think Selene Gisil is an admirer of Deniau. She very much is not. Gisil had been his student, but became convinced his work was poisonous. Years later, he died and she discovered in his will that he had made her effectively his archivist, with access to his greatest achievement, Rose House, seven days a year. No one else is allowed in at all, and so Gisil is the one everyone turns to for any information she can give them.

It's not just resentment, though. Rose House is a truly intelligent AI, a "haunt," and Gisil finds it truly creepy. In this first year after his death, she has managed only three days in the house, and then left, wishing she could choose never to return.

Now she has to go back, because there's a new dead body in there, and Detective Smith can't get in there without her. May not get in there with her, but definitely won't without her.

What follows is Gisil's discomfort with being inside Rose House again, Smith's attempt to investigate the death with only what she could carry in and what Rose House will allow, and her partner police detective in the tiny town of China Lake, Oliver Torres, on the outside, following up on strange visitors showing an interest in Rose House right now. A man claiming to represent a company involved in auctions and art representation. A woman who says she's a reporter with the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. They're both willing to talk--to a point--and he sets to work trying to check the information they've given him.

Along the way, he discovers he can't communicate with Maritza after she's inside Rose House.

On the inside, Maritza is finding that the AI in the walls (and floors, and ceiling) can do a great deal more than control access to the building, and the climate within. Along the way, she persuades Rose House (or does Rose House persuade her) to allow her into the part of the building that the dead man wanted to visit. The AI also shows her a replay of events, not an easily understandable replay of events, involving the man--and Maritza begins to get an idea of what happened.

Gisil is having her own creepy experiences, with more prior understanding of what Rose House can do than Maritza had.

Soon the question for both of them is, will they get out of there alive?

Oliver's own investigation outside is also getting alarming, confusing, and guilt-inducing--he let Maritza go into Rose House without backup, and he, too, starts to realize she'll only get out if Rose House wants her to.

It's a tense, fear-inducing experience, for the characters and the reader.

It was hard to put down.

I received this book as a gift.

This one hundred percent lives up to the promise of an Arkady Martine book. Every character is a whole person., even Rose House itself. The mystery keeps you guessing the whole way and the pacing ratchets up the suspense the further you get. Absolutely fantastic.

I desperately wanted to love this one (AI is one of my favorite topics), but alas I didn’t connect with it at all. For a novella as short as this, I feel like there was too many POV‘s thrown in. I didn’t really feel invested no matter how hard I tried, and felt myself disassociating from the story numerous times. The premise was so perfect and original though so I find it really unfortunate that I felt this way.

"Rose/House" is a creepy science fiction thriller about an AI "haunting" a house after the owner has died. There's a murder, and a cop trying to solve the crime despite the AI's lack of assistance. The AI and idea of the house were deliciously disturbing. There was an unexpected twist. I enjoyed this novella and will read more from the author.

This short, gothic sci fi story was interesting and creepy.

I like the author’s use of language to set the tone. I had to look up the meaning of several different words, and they always meant precisely the right thing for the paragraph or sentence they were in.

I’ve noticed a recent tendency in books to include lines of dialogue from multiple different speakers in the same paragraph, and this book does this—I find it confusing, so it caused me to have to reread a few paragraphs for clarity.

For being a novella, I thought the characters are fairly well fleshed out. The setting was absolutely vivid and just the right amount of creepy for Halloween time. The pacing was good and the ending fairly satisfying.

I would recommend this to fans of Dare to Know by James Kennedy and maybe also Sarah Gailey.

This book had me riveted from the beginning, but I can't help but feel let down by the lack of answers at the end - I know that's kind of the point, but I'm still feeling lost without them. I know this is going to be a story that sticks with me for awhile regardless. Utterly haunting.

This was everything that I was hoping for from a scifi gothic thriller novel. It had that element that I was looking for and enjoyed the idea of all of someone’s architecture being haunted. The characters were well written and enjoyed that the building worked overall in this. Arkady Martine has a great writing style and worked with the genre.

I love Arkady Martine so I wanted to love this novella more than I did. I think this particular genre just didn't work for me. It was well written and kept my attention (though not the author's best work), and I enjoyed the take on the future of the planet and concepts of AI, but it left too many things open ended for me to truly enjoy it. I know some people love that, deciding for themselves what the futures of the characters could be and what 'really happened', but I prefer things wrapped up with a neat bow.

An interesting novella, packed with interesting ideas, but it also didn’t quite click for me — the pacing seemed off, and some passages/scenes weren’t as well-written as I would have expected from Martine. Nevertheless, certainly worth checking out if you've enjoyed the author's work in the past. Maybe it just wasn't for me..

Rose/House is a future-noir haunted house book about na architect and a detective who return to a "haunt"; a house with an AI whose original creator and owner has died leaving the house to its own deliberations. When the house calls the China Lake precinct to report a dead body within its walls, Detective Maritza Smith contacts the architect's former protege, Dr. Selene Gisil, who has been unable to escape his legacy. No one can enter Rose House, the AI controlled home, except for Gisil, who has been designated its archivist, so the details of how someone gained entry, let alone a dead body, is a mystery.

Rose/House does a lot of speculating about the function of architecture as artistic expression beyond the function of shelter, and the role of humans as an integrated part of the structure itself. In that sense it's a thoroughly postmodern examination of the form viewed through the lens of Haunted House horror. Martine deftly weaves a tale with no easy conclusions, following the tropes of the inescapability of Haunted-House-as-trauma, while also using the inhuman AI as an ineffable stand-in for the unknowable supernatural.

If you like your horror fiction highly meta and speculative, this is a fun read.