The House of Rumour: A Novel

Mixing the invented and the real, The House of Rumour explores WWII spy intrigue (featuring Ian Fleming), occultism (Aleister Crowley), the West Coast science fiction set (Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and Philip K. Dick all appear), and the new wave music scene of the ’80s. The decades-spanning, labyrinthine plot even weaves in The Jonestown Massacre and Rudolf Hess, UFO sightings and B-movies. Told through multiple narrators, what at first appears to be a constellation of random events begins to cohere as the work of a shadow organization—or is it just coincidence?Tying the strands together is Larry Zagorski, an early pulp fiction writer turned US fighter pilot turned “American gnostic,” who looks back on his long and eventful life, searching for connections between the seemingly disparate parts. The teeming network of interlaced secrets he uncovers has personal relevance—as it mirrors a book of twenty-two interconnected stories he once wrote, inspired by the Major Arcana cards in the tarot.Hailed as an heir to Don DeLillo’s Underworld by The Guardian, The House of Rumour is a tour de force that sweeps the reader through a century’s worth of secret histories.

From Booklist

Interweaving a large cast of characters—some real, some purely fictional—British author Arnott takes the reader on a labyrinthine (Borges being a frequent reference) excursion through much of the mid- to late twentieth century. Beginning during World War II (mysterious fugitive Nazi Rudolf Hess figures in the plot), Arnott utilizes the forms and preoccupations of pulp fiction and the lives of its practitioners (from L. Ron Hubbard to Ian Fleming and Robert Heinlein) in the seminal years of genre writing (spy thrillers, science fiction) in driving the plot. His imagined characters are well drawn and their interactions compelling, and they are interestingly joined in the action by contemporaries including Aleister Crowley and, later, the Reverend Jim Jones. This big, intricate novel with a large and varied vast of characters, though unique, may appeal to readers of Jennifer Egan and David Mitchell, as well as to fans of the respective genres. --Mark Levine

Kirkus,

"Jake Arnott’s newest novel, The House of Rumour, is a page-turner with exceptional style, depth, thought, camp, counter-history and intrigue. It’s both sci-fi/fantasy pulp and an ambitiously epic work of cosmic proportions: a welcome paradox of a novel that boldly toys with the boundaries between high and low-brow art."

David Bowie"Ingenious. Impressively detailed. An entertaining farrago whose invention never flags, The House of Rumour [chronicles] the lifestyles of the nerdy and perverted who made up the fringe-science/SF scene in 1940s Southern California."

“Best Books of 2013”"Whenever he's got a new book out I drop everything..."

Devin McKinney, Critics at Large"I have always enjoyed Jake Arnott’s glam-rock gangster novels, but they hardly prepared me for The House of Rumour. Confirming that the inter-linked short story is the coolest literary form du jour, Arnott shuffled narratives about science-fiction, Scientology, Eighties pop stars, doomed love, nuclear physics and the occult into a knowing, clever and intricately woven collection that deserves to rain on Cloud Atlas’s parade or accompany Jennifer Egan on a visit to the goon squad. Brilliant and oddly moving, The House of Rumour deserved to win every prize going, including Eurovision."

"Arnott’s mesh of fantasy and fact holds together as a novel. He makes scenes live, both in their moments and as parts of a whole. He has no trouble slipping into his characters' skins, transmitting empathically from their often lonesome, disturbed interiors…. Despite his narrator’s metaphor of free particles, Arnott doesn’t say that history is the sum of random collisions, and therefore absurd, weightless. He says that history is weightier, less random than we can know, because at innumerable decision points, great and small – some minutely documented for posterity, most now dead with their owners – another choice could have been made. Why a decision went as it did, why history turned a certain way: That is the secret. We can call these facts obvious, and so dismiss them. But like any good novel, The House of Rumour makes the obvious problematic, the factual mysterious. It makes the question of what is real in our world feel like the biggest secret of all."

About the Author

Jake Arnott is the author of The Long Firm, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year that was acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. It was followed by He Kills Coppers, Truecrime, Johnny Come Home, and The Devil's Paintbrush. Both The Long Firm and He Kills Coppers have been made into widely praised TV dramas in the UK. Arnott lives in London. The following playlist for The House of Rumour was excerpted from a piece Arnott contributed to the blog Largehearted Boy.

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