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.