Man, F*ck This House
by Brian Asman
Black Stone Publishing, 2025
374 pages
Adult
This month, Man, F*ck This House was picked up by Black Stone Publishing, who added six more of author Brian Asman’s short stories and a blood-red cover to make a full length release introducing Asman as a talented new voice on the chiller scene.
The title story, originally independently released as a solo novelette, unavoidably brings to mind the comparison: Stewie vs. Monster House. A family moves to a new home that begins to assert itself through ghostly interactions, primarily with the mother, Sabrina. As the audience, we are unsure of its intent. The haunting is vague, almost confusing, since its ghosts are… still living people, and seem to live only in Sabrina’s psyche, but that uncertainty is the real tension in this ghost story. Is the house malevolent? Protective? Is it haunted by a poltergeist? What is its goal? The house is certainly a main character as much here as in any gothic. The mystery begins with digging up its back story, but that leads to a… dead end.
The narrative is a modern psychological thriller in the gothic tradition of a woman alone in a struggle against her house and the past it represents. Though there’s not a lot of fast action, it’s no slow-burn either. The mystery pulls you through quickly, along with the added tension of the B story: the evil child-genius. Normally I love me a cold-hearted, calculating mastermind, but this, this little… kid, he wants to drive his mom all the way off the deep end-crazy without any concern for how it will affect his sister or his dad. The narrator tells us he’s not a sociopath, it’s just an act? This house may just need to tan his behind! There are definite Stewie (Family Guy) vibes from the character aptly named Damien. The little monster gouges a pentagram in the house’s pristine hardwood floors, but don’t worry– there will be carnage and destruction to a degree that makes such simple vandalism seem negligible. Chapters lengthen exponentially until a finale that delivers a surreal punch I guarantee you won’t be expecting.
Don’t go into the book with expectations of serious torture, despair, and terror. This horror anthology is a fun romp with gore, ghosts, prankster kid-geniuses, and cryptids.
In the Rushes is the kind of tale I would expect to see in Cemetery Dance Magazine; an imaginative mother-daughter bite of helplessness and horror, the kind that follows you to an unavoidable, quick deadfall, endure-or-die moment.
The next three short stories deal with urban legend and cryptids, spins on both Bloody Mary and that furry mascot that’s always photo bombing you, closer and closer… but “Razor Bill” really stood out to me. A simple slasher told with enough kids-on-bikes nostalgia to really make it resonate.
Then Asman shows us he has the chops for hard-boiled crime fiction. An intriguing police case with an old-world supernatural element that, with Asman’s adept, does not become the story’s main focus.
The final act is perhaps a spin on Manly Wade Wellman’s folk horror masterpiece “The Gardinel”, but modernized by Asman. You can taste the influence of The Gate, too. Again, a very adult story told from the eyes of a kid who finds a tire swing in the woods. Asman’s writing skill shines in this coup de grace as he highlights the spooky stuff only a kid would notice right alongside the nostalgia of looking back on times that should have been pure magic but were tainted with blood, horror and loss.
