The House in November by Keith Laumer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The story begins with a scenario of weirdness that we have come to recognize as a Twilight Zone set-up: a man wakes up and everything has changed but no one will acknowledge it, first with his family, then his neighborhood, his hometown, and finally the world. The changes escalate as does his confusion. Eventually he meets others who have noticed the change as well but each has his own explanation and says our protagonist has lost his faculties. At this point the novel could embrace this ambiguity — everyone has their own version of reality and who’s to say which one is “real”? Instead, the protagonist finds establishes the truth (though with some more twists along the way). Then the novel falls into a standard Laumer motif: ” lone-wolf, latent superhuman protagonists, self-sacrifice, and transcendence” (wiki). This gives the novel a mishmash feel, first one genre, then another. It’s not entirely unsatisfying but in the transition, many questions are left unanswered. Overall a nice diversion but little more.



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