Gravestones in the Basement

Leah Dworkin interviews Harris Lahti about his debut novel, “Foreclosure Gothic.”

By Leah DworkinJuly 13, 2025

• Fiction

HARRIS LAHTI’S DEBUT NOVEL Foreclosure Gothic is as much a peephole into family dynamics as it is a crawl space haunted by shadows of American lore. The story opens in Los Angeles, where aspiring actor Vic Greener gets by by making commercials before finally landing a role in a daytime soap. Going “full method” in his on-screen doctor persona, Vic is taking a walk down the Venice boardwalk when he bumps into his future wife, Heather. Unexpectedly, he falls hard, and the two relocate to his homeland of Upstate New York, where he transfers his creative energy to restoring and flipping foreclosed homes.

It’s a skill Vic, like Lahti’s own father before him, eventually passes on to his son, Junior, who ages into a main character by the second half of the novel. The unfolding narrative exposes two sides of the same coin: the dreams parents sacrifice for their children and the trade-offs children can make on behalf of their parents. Taken together, these flipped perspectives spotlight the tension between capital-I individuality and inheritance—a dynamic thrown into even sharper relief by the book’s structure.

In a cultural landscape saturated with remakes and algorithmic storylines engineered to mimic past successes and deliver tidy, marketable resolutions, what distinguishes Foreclosure Gothic is Lahti’s intuitive aesthetic and conceptual control: his stylized, hyperconcrete prose conjures scenes that are both vivid and withholding. The contemporary gothic circles questions that break us into a world artfully constructed with solid facts that reverberate with echoes of something else—living meanings that refuse to settle. Chapters are eclipsed by large gaps in time, forming a constellation of pivotal moments in which the absences speak.  It was heartening to be reminded that this kind of attention—not just to topic but to the architecture of story itself—is not extinct; that there are still emerging authors who are committed to the slow, enduring labor of processing the possibility the art form allows. Here is a novel that, in snapshots, captures the subtle shifts in how we make sense of change and carve out futures that are rebuilt upon a messy, layered, often murky past. Foreclosure Gothic traces the ghostly framework of the American dream—carving from the bedrock of collective myth and memory, and inheriting layouts rebuilt with salvaged materials, forever shaped by half-finished renovations and the stories we tell ourselves again and again.

Lahti and I were both quick to cast our votes for doing this interview the old-fashioned way: a faceless phone call. He is easy to talk to, like a friend who used to call you on your parent’s landline. While we chatted, he paced the outskirts of his upstate home, once a foreclosure, where he now lives with his wife and two young children.

¤

LEAH DWORKIN: Writing this novel, where did you begin?

HARRIS LAHTI: It started with what would become the second chapter, “Sugar Bath,” in which Vic Greener increasingly fears how his pregnant wife Heather’s transition into motherhood will change their relationship and future, and he wants to move into the foreclosure he’s been renovating as a flip. It came to me in one of those moments: you sit down to write, you black out, and when you come to, there’s this frighteningly coherent story spat out in front of you. I still remember scribbling it out while squatting on my couch like a gargoyle. It was so outside of the style I’d been writing in.

Maybe it’s not so magical, though. At the time—this was 2017ish—I’d just purchased a foreclosure at auction with my father and was in the process of cleaning out the previous owner’s belongings; I was in a serious relationship, thinking about starting a family; I was a grad student, wondering what shape my writing life might take; I was also reading a lot of Fleur Jaeggy—mainly her collection Last Vanities—which utilizes sentence fragmentation in this delightfully sinister way.

Anyway, when I workshopped the story with other writers, I was shocked by their response. It was one of those rare moments you get out of your own way. When your subconscious manifests itself like that, I’ve learned, it’s always worth cultivating.

“Sugar Bath” is where the story really takes off, when Vic finds two gravestones in the basement. That chapter seems to propel the rest of the story into motion.

Totally. The writing process didn’t flow linearly from there. The next chapter I wrote took place about 50 years later. But then I had my thesis and antithesis, and I could deploy the dialectical method by synthesizing their different elements to write another in-between chapter, and so on.

It’s an exhilarating approach, to be honest. It encourages a sense of discovery versus a sense of invention; the next unwritten chapter always felt like something that was waiting inside the others that surrounded it. I never had to pull out of thin air or invent. I feel like “invention” triggers the bullshit alarm inside our animal minds, which prevents readers from fully entering the fictive dream.

I was struck by the two distinct drives Vic and Heather exhibit as they create their shared future: Vic is all about restoring and fixing things, trying to surge forth, while Heather is more invested in finding out about the people that inhabited these spaces before her, as well as in gardening. It made me wonder about archetypal masculine and feminine modes.

I think a lot about evolutionary psychology and inherited impulses. The world our brains evolved to live in 150,000 years ago and the world we live in now are so vastly different—and it’s inside this friction that, I believe, so many of our modern anxieties dwell, as well as the underlying engine that powers our most compelling stories.

But, yes, once Vic’s star fades as an actor, his pursuit of real estate is directly tied to his loss of status, and like an archetypical male, he sets to work—attempting to prove himself to Heather as a hunter, a provider, a strong mate. Renovating houses isn’t as sexy as acting (or so Vic feels), and this is an insecurity he increasingly overcompensates for.

Heather is much more inclined toward nurture: she cultivates her home, her garden; she grows their food, as well as their business. From an evolutionary perspective, the demands of starting a family fall to the female: pregnancy, recovery, breastfeeding, etc. You don’t just take that risk with anyone, and once you’ve decided to do it, you do it and that is that. There’s an emotional durability to her that Vic lacks, one that I’d identify as (archetypally) female. She’s committed and there’s no looking back.

But that’s sort of the rub, right? The idea of committing and not looking back, this form of unconditional love. There’s a beauty to it, but also a horror in being totally accepted and supported by the person you love. Which raises the question—once your ability to hunt no longer materially determines how well you eat, once you’ve raised your offspring, established your safe home, what purpose do you serve? How do you square the circle of your continuing life?

As we get through the book, we see how that plays out in the intergenerational similarities between father and son. Junior is initially resistant to catching his father’s logic, or living the kind of life his father has chosen to live, but it finds a way to trickle in …

I think that’s something that happens to everyone: the nine-to-five comes for us all! And one of its favorite Trojan horses, ironically, is love. When we first fall in love, you know, it’s this unbelievable thing: it eclipses all.

But the natural extension and conclusion of that love, however precious it remains, exists inside of a world that will grow repetitive and mundane if you choose to start a family. There’s no avoiding it. If you want to move to Costa Rica, live in a hut, eating only Cup O’ Noodles every night as you write your novel, that’s one thing—but you sure as shit can’t do that with a child (or really, at this point, the future intent of having a child). You’re going to have to neck up and make some money. Slowly but surely, Junior also comes to understand this.

Totally. The perspectives you encompass here are very much those of our parents’ generation versus, in the later pages, our own. I do feel like there’s this baby boomer narrative our parents often have of the American dream—work hard, be responsible, and you’ll make it. Do you think this American dream has changed over the past few generations? Is it attainable? Valuable, even?

I think much of the friction is just the idealism of youth meeting the realities of adulthood. But now that I’m thinking about it, of course: the imbalance is baked in. Anyone with half a slab of brain can see that the American dream is less attainable for our generation—for Junior’s generation. I am doing far worse financially than either of my parents at 35. Am I lazy? Did the internet rattle my brain? Was it 9/11? Did Ronald Reagan lead the boomers on a heist to steal our future for their own? Maybe, maybe, maybe …

Still, my thinking is: What difference does it make? Our headwinds—technology, a crowded workforce, housing shortages—are very different from those of previous generations, and seem more insidious in a lot of ways that boomers, I find, have a difficult time understanding. Our cocaine isn’t just cocaine anymore. The average cost of a home in the 1980s in Orange County, New York (adjusted for today’s inflation), would’ve been $250,000. And now it’s about double that. An enormous hurdle, among many others. But new forms of adversity are no excuse to roll over and die in your underwear on the plush chaise longue in your parents’ McMansion.

I also think it’s a matter of expectation-setting. We don’t tax the rich in this country like we should because, deep down, many of us believe that one day, we’ll be rich too. I think a reframing of the American dream isn’t a bad idea, and it starts with ideals: a focus on the inner life instead of the materialistic one. There’s a reason reported happiness plateaus at $150,000 in annual household income.

Were you able to write this book because you were in between being someone’s child and becoming a parent yourself?

I didn’t have kids when writing Foreclosure Gothic, and I don’t think I would have been able to write in the same way if I had. I would’ve been far too generous in the chapters where Junior and Vic are hashing out their differences—the snark and angst Junior directs at his father would have been difficult to access after I became a father myself. Now I have two young children, and there are moments of utter chaos with them where I find myself thinking, “I can’t believe my parents did this for me.”

Carl Jung [is often credited with the saying] “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents,” and I think that’s true. For a long time, I never understood why my father gave up acting after I was born—and I think maybe part of writing Foreclosure Gothic was me trying to work through that feeling of resentment, or confusion. But I think it’s something we all feel toward our parents at some point. Having my own children evaporated those feelings much more quickly, and under those circumstances, the writing wouldn’t have felt as life-or-death.

Yes—and that mix of resentment and projection feels really delicately handled throughout the novel. There are these strange, unspoken transfers of guilt. You were restoring your own foreclosed house while writing this book. How did the process of restoration inform your writing?

The clutter in that house, which is now my current home, informed a lot of the first chapter, as well as many of the recurring motifs of death and renewal. With foreclosures, it’s funny: the bank or the county or the wholesaler doesn’t want to waste their time showing them. They’re basically like, “Go and look in the windows—bid on this piece of shit at your own risk.” I still remember the first time I jimmied and crawled into the living room through one of the windows of my now-house. There was a mealy old armchair with a TV set up in front of it on a dinner tray; another dinner tray beside it covered in pill bottles, fast-food wrappers; and plastic bags strewn everywhere. You can tell someone had been living and sleeping in that space—and only in that space—for a long time. Right up until the end.

Anyway, I bought the house with my father, and we started cleaning it up. Beneath the top layer, the mess, an orderly house began to emerge incrementally, with every garbage bag I stuffed and carried out. The cabinets had all been handmade with the tools in the basement. There were smiling family pictures hung behind the dirty mattress leaning against the wall. Chinaware in the kitchen drawers for holidays. Silver utensils. Diaries. Which is to say, a story of a once-loving family. The parents must’ve died; the daughter continued to live in the house; at some point, she became hooked on drugs and slowly began to erode this once domestic space.

Even without the family there to tell you, their story remains, which you’re then a part of. But your job, as a house flipper, is to erase that story from the home, to repair everything and paint away all the grime their lives had flecked over the walls for decades and decades. Yet even after it’s all clean and tidy, some aspect of its previous life always remains.

There’s something about being in a house that once had another life, or stepping inside the lives of others, that reminds me of your novel’s beginning, when Vic is still in L.A. pursuing his acting career. That writing really explores the practice and experiences that come from Method acting, and there are parallels between Vic’s two distinct professions, or art forms: acting and house-renovating. The way you describe both processes resonated with me, especially as they seem so clearly to reflect many aspects of writing.

That’s interesting. Konstantin Stanislavski, a “pioneer” of Method acting, emphasized the importance of being physically and mentally relaxed. Loose, ready—without the clutter that might otherwise distract from the role at hand. If you read his book An Actor Prepares, and switch out “acting” for “writing,” it really does read like a one-to-one creative writing craft book. One of the pillars of his Method regards the pursuit of emotional authenticity—basically, drawing from personal experience to make the unreal appear real by evoking similar feelings in you as an actor.

My father, like Vic, was an actor; he did soaps and TV shows and feature films. Once the financial realities of the family he’d started with my mother set in, he walked away to start renovating and flipping houses. The novel hangs on the arc of his life, an arc that contains many of the same anxieties I experience as a fledgling author. That way, I’m breathing my experience with art, with romance, into his own experience and timeline.

When did you start working on houses?

I always helped my father out, but the first house I did top-to-bottom with him was in high school. This farmhouse by the onion fields whose occupants appeared to have simply vanished, leaving everything behind. It was a glimpse into the hard lives some families lead … Unimaginable lives. There were shotgun shells ground down into the dirt, a rusted-out mobile home—and this series of small barns, I remember, one of which contained this dirty old mattress, a refrigerator full of rotten food, and an old rabbit-eared TV. It was another example of a family’s history emerging from what they’d left.

Then I went to college, and skated, got drunk, got a degree in psychology and English. (Mainly, I skated.) But when I came home, I continued to help him while trying to forge my own way: falling in love, then slowly revising my life until I, too, gave in and started to renovate my own houses.

I’m curious about “the house” as a container or force in literature. Were there other influential books you were looking at when thinking about a house as a character, as having its own distinct energetic charge, or were you primarily working with the feelings you have about houses you personally know?

I don’t believe in ghosts. If they exist, I would’ve seen one. But I do believe in hauntings—not in a paranormal sense, more as a malignant result of the arrangement of what they contain. I love Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House for that reason: the way that much of the eeriness of the house is a direct result of its architecture. The stairs aren’t built evenly, the doorframe is canted, the acoustics of the foyer make you cover you ears when the door creaks open—the gestalt of which produces extreme horror and dread.

But truthfully, I wasn’t looking at anything. Most of the house stuff was ripped from my life: the relapsing garbage man, his treehouse, the old lady stashed away in the degraded house of a pair of rich twins. The real-life house with the graves in the basement is right down the road. I was four or five when my dad bought it. It’s late 1700s, early 1800s (par for the course around here). My mother would take my sister and me to play there all the time: a beautiful old house with a pond in back. My parents had been talking about moving into it at the time. Then my dad has this dream where I die there. My grandmother visits and, for whatever reason, refuses to go inside. His workers complained about being left there alone. One day, he’s down in the basement, pulling up the floor, and discovers these two gravestones: a mother, a child. Apparently, the town historian explained, it wasn’t so unusual. Around the turn of the century, they forced people to bury family members in cemeteries, which cost money—money people didn’t have. He also said another child had died there within the past 50 years. There were six-foot-long indentations in the gardens too, suggesting more bodies. A drunk had lived there and had frozen to death outside … The list of horrors just went on and on.

After that, my parents decided not to move in. They were reacting to something real inside that house, something from its past that still held its charge. Remember a few years ago, when that woman with a van full of kids killed a bunch of people driving the wrong way on the Taconic? Apparently, she lived in that house, the house I had almost grown up in. Which is to say, this whole experience is one of my earliest memories, and my father has been at this for a long, long time. I had a lot of inspiration.

¤

Harris Lahti’s short stories have appeared in BOMB, New York Tyrant, Ninth Letter, Southwest Review, Forever Magazine, and elsewhere. He co-founded the new press Cash 4 Gold Books and edits fiction for Fence. For a living, he paints and renovates houses.