forthcoming in Fall 2024 from Astrophil Press
Ever since they’ve been working on the Losada family’s historic Victorian house, the six members of the Lotus Painting crew have discovered something worse than manual labor. Brooding over minor annoyances, increasingly prone to fits of rage, their days and nights are troubled by strange visions and new appetites. Dieter turns to self-harm, Curtis starts stalking the Losada’s teenage son, Pete becomes obsessed with researching the house’s venomous past, and Mikey—kicked out of his mom’s place—shacks up in the attic of the Hack House.
If they knew about the painters that preceded them on the job, the crew that only lasted a single day—the fire, the self-inflicted burn—then maybe they’d look for work elsewhere. As the crew’s contagion spreads to the four members of the Losada family, they find themselves besieged from within and without, home improvement devolving into home invasion over the course of one blistering Michigan summer.
"A destabilizing, polyvocal menace of a novel. Something strange is happening at Hack House and none of the people in or around it is properly acknowledging the danger until it's much too late and a chaotic climax tears through the attempts to avoid the creep of a sinister threat. Sacksteder also manages an outsized amount of humor amidst all the horror. A deliciously unnerving delight."
Jac Jemc, author of Empty Theatre and The Grip of It