In perhaps his most haunting consideration of secondhand spaces, legendary musician Tom Waits once growled, “You take on the dreams of the ones who have slept there.” Dramatics aside, this is no truer than in the case of Valerie Laken’s unsettling debut novel, “Dream House.”
Already a Pushcart and Hopwood award-winning short story writer, Laken has recently settled into her second semester teaching for the UW-Milwaukee’s Creative Writing program, during which time she was able to finalize her first full-length work.
Set in her former residence of Ann Arbor, Mich., “Dream House” follows the periodic occupants on an unassuming house on Macon Street. After a violent crime in the late 1980s ultimately ousts the struggling occupants, the house finds its way into the hands of young couple named Kate and Stuart Kinzler.
As a dilapidated rental property in 2005, the house attracts Kate Kinzler’s attention, and she plans to renovate it into a perfect home, despite the objections of her her husband and her real estate developer father.
When the crime’s unlikely perpetrator, a gentle young man named Walker, is released from prison he must come to terms with his family’s newfound relocation, as memories and the echoes of his now-stale crime begin to resurface for all involved.
As opposed to a loaded thematic presentation of particular spaces as “cursed,” Laken masterfully examines the psychological implications and realistic reverberations of violence within one’s ideal home. That being said, early labeling of Laken’s novel as a contemporary ghost story feels just a trifle inaccurate.
Much like life, the spirit of the past is what each character makes it. With the revelation of the house’s sordid history, both Kate and Stuart begin to view the interior differently. What was a routine remodeling quickly becomes a franticly obsessive effort to cover up all traces of the house’s past.
As Walker benignly tries to recapture the image of his childhood home amidst the ongoing demolition, reverberations of the domestic strife long ago begin to creep into Kate and Stuart’s relationship in surprising ways.
Clashes over the concept of home are among the novel’s most poignant moments. While the plot may occasionally, and briefly, meander into cut-and-dry thrills, the thoroughly vivid characters are what propel the novel beyond convention.
Laken’s compulsively readable prose details the minute intimacies of families on both sides of the tracks, and the effect is unnervingly genuine and thoroughly disarming.
Ultimately, the novel’s literary coup de grace comes in its wholly unique reworking of the notion of home building. The physical reconstruction of the house on Macon Street is much more complex than a simple redecorating. As each character discovers, homes are not simply built, but crafted and nurtured by our own idiosyncrasies and memories, from the little joys of domestic personalization to the harsh words exchanged behind locked doors.
As Laken wonderfully illustrates, underneath the placid surfaces of every dream home are both beautiful and ugly truths that can echo through any new coat of paint, to the delight and disturbance of us all.
