Primal House

When our narrator's house is reclaimed by the wilderness, she embarks with her Pooch on a rambling and rollicking journey. She meets undead deer and living skeletons, travels through dream worlds and deserts of longing, and untangles truths from the messy web of life.

"Is life a burden or a gift, and who decides who survives or perishes? Primal House uproots and unravels the world you think you know, contorting it into a mythological ethnography of motherhood narrated by an elusive observer with two anthropology degrees-who feels uncannily like Koss herself, cast as the protagonist of a freaky fairytale written from inside a hallucinatory postpartum state. This surreal world has talking animals, animate skeletons and narcissistic Gods with whom she becomes intimately entwined, playing the heroine in a story she's also voyeuristically watching and taking notes on from afar. In this strange landscape where time follows its own dream-logic governed by rules that shift without warning, contradictions swarm every page. Everywhere is birth and death. Communities bloom and dissolve. Actions to protect actually destroy. Life is so precious, this novel insists, yet you might be eaten in an instant. Your mother might hold you or devour you. There's always a lion lurking nearby, waiting to eat your babies. Ultimately, the end of every world becomes the birth of another. "There's only one story, repeating and reflecting," our narrator muses, "It's like the blind men and the elephant. We're all just touching the parts." Primal House gives and gives from a limitless reserve of devastating love for all that lives and breathes. I say it's a gift."

-Rachel Nagelberg, author of The Fifth Wall

Primal House by Emily Koss is a surreal romp that proves you don't have to go very far to travel to a new place. Filled with rangers that turn into gods, skeleton friends, and families that thrive in electrical wires, it takes us through an ever changing and lush reality-adjacent world. Throughout, Primal House touches on loyalty and motherhood, religion, relationships, and the complexity of life and death. With a touch of wry humor, a mythical raven opens an entire set of cultures and a vast, mapped subconscious. Witty and raw, an unpredictable and dream-filled personal journey will pull you into its sumptuous creation.

-Janna Miller, author of All Lovers Burn at the End of the World