Author:
John Elizabeth Stintzi
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create accountLimited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks!
Nowโs a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Sign up todayBad Houses
This audiobook uses AI narration.
Weโre taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreSummary
A boisterous collection of surreal, darkly humourous short stories that will delight fans of George Saunders and Kelly Link
From John Elizabeth Stintzi, the mind that created the daringly bizarre novel My Volcano, comes an electrifying collection of strange and dark tales.
In the surreal, often precarious realities of Bad Houses, a doctor discovers a double-edged cure for the Ebola virus, a college student loses a different body part each time they return home for the summer, Midas's hairdresser strives to keep his secrets, and a young girl develops a fascination with the trolls who harvest her father's pumpkin patch. At once humourous and horrifying, these stories will inevitably take residence in your mind.
Present throughout Bad Houses is a deep and abiding sense of humanity sprinkled with a dash of alienation, guilt, and instability. Filtered through a fabulist lens, these stories contemplate the struggles of modern existence. Each character lives their own haunted life, trying to navigate the path from bad houses to good homes.
Audiobook details
Narrator:
T'รกnchรกy Redvers
ISBN:
9781778523601
Length:
4 hours 40 minutes
Language:
English
Publisher:
ECW Press
Publication date:
January 14, 2025
Edition:
Unabridged
Reviews
โThese modern-day fairy tales are a seamless mesh of the familiar and the surrealโa cocktail that mirrors the oddness and absurdity of everyday life.โ โ Peter Deligdisch, visual artist and creator of Peter Draws
โStintzi paints a portrait of our current moment from a dizzying array of vantage points. A poet laureate of calamity.โ โ Michael DeForge, cartoonist of Birds of Maine
โBad Houses is a rare, incomparable collection, surreal yet firmly anchored to the mechanics of contemporary living. Mimes, dismemberment, pumpkin patch trolls, creatures made of mould and laundryโthese are not run-of-the-mill stories, and yet in every case, John Elizabeth Stintziโs depth of feeling and concern for what it means to be in the world right now shines through. This is a work of art in just about every sense.โ โ Omar El Akkad, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of What Strange Paradise
โJohn Elizabeth Stintzi blends the absurd, the surreal, or the deeply unlikely into these short fictions that are ultimately about our messy, mundane humanity. Playing with the tropes of horror, folklore, and legend, the unrealities of Bad Houses hold up a funhouse mirror to our lives.โ โ Quill & Quire
โThis adventurous and offbeat collection blends fantastical motifs and myths with comic stories of contemporary life โฆ Stintzi exhibits a flair for fearlessly bizarre character sketches and macabre scenes. Fans of Kelly Link ought to snatch this up.โ โ Publishers Weekly
Expand reviews