In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Harris Lahti’s novel Foreclosure Gothic is a suspenseful and imaginative debut.
The Brooklyn Rail wrote of the book:
“Harris Lahti’s debut, Foreclosure Gothic, is a goth song in novel form. It is full of murk, omens, melodrama, the lushness of carnality, and the fearsomeness of love’s darker impulses . . . Lahti is a master of the portent.”
In his own words, here is Harris Lahti’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Foreclosure Gothic:
Waylon Jennings – We Had It all
Highwaymen – Silver Stallion
Highwaymen – Highwayman
At its core, Foreclosure Gothic is a love story, and the first chapter, where Vic falls for Heather, is based on my experienced first dating my wife: The way the intense passion I felt for her, despite how well things were going, always spilled into fear the second she left; the way I always figured, for no reason at all, I’d never see her again.
Anyway, during that time, we frequented this dive bar near the onion fields that hosted this open mic night, where the farmers came in their dirty work clothes to strum guitars and sing sad cowboy songs with the house band; The Highwaymen were a popular choice, and I can still remember sitting at the bar, hearing these songs, trying to drink away the dread of potentially never seeing her again as the clock ticked toward last call.
Dystopia – My Meds Aren’t Working
I wrote a handful of the chapters in Foreclosure Gothic while commuting to Sarah Lawrence. This was 2017, and I was driving this horrific lemon-yellow Saturn Vue with a steering issue that caused the vehicle to vibrate in a way that, unbeknownst to me, caused the tires to go prematurely bald. Very bald. I’d be listening to Dystopia’s self-titled album (the only CD I had) while fishtailing all over the road at driving ninety miles an hour—a perfect state, it seems in retrospect, to mull over what would become this darkly funny, dramatic, and at times horrifying novel.
Song to the Siren – This Mortal Coil
This is famously David Lynch’s favorite song, a song he attempted to place in many of his films, but which, due to copy right issues, only appears in Lost Highway; a movie that, like so many of his movies, traffics heavily in the uncanny, a device that I deploy throughout Foreclosure Gothic via Vic Greener, an ex-soap opera star turned renovator of foreclosed houses, who, despite his new day job and family life, can’t help being falling back into warped versions of the characters he once played on TV.
Lost Highway, Lynch has said, was inspired by the O.J. Simpson trial and the question of how a person continues to live a normal life after getting away with such extreme violence. This seems related to Foreclosure Gothic: To a smaller degree, of course, and yet somehow no less acute; the past, it seems to me, that Vic needs to stuff down is almost as unfathomable; he, too, must split himself in two in order to live.
Fleetwood Mac – Angel (Live in St. Louis, 1979)
The live version, not the studio recording.
It’s one of their poppier songs, but the lyrics cause the song to transcend toward something else entirely, something eerie and more emotionally charged than expected: a charmed hour, a haunted song, closing your eyes and becoming the part of the breeze that we all long for some time…
Before bed, after a long day, I would smoke a spliff and listen to this song and quickly discover I wasn’t tired anymore, that I felt inspired to write; there’s just something wildly romantic about the song to me; this idea of an enduring love interests me much more than lust; of still looking up when you walk in the room; a sentiment that resounded whenever, after listening to Angel, I worked on Foreclosure Gothic, as it examines the ups-and-downs of such a lifelong partnership.
To Love Somebody – Janis Joplin
The Woodman in the Morning on WPDH, 101.5; this is pre-internet days. At work my dad would play classic rock all day. I worked for him, on and off, for my entire adult life, renovating foreclosed houses, and this was always one of my favorite songs he’d play.
And many more just like it scored the experiences that comprise much of my book: everything from the gravestones discovered in the basement to the farmhouse being nearly set ablaze, to the maybe-stroke my father suffered that didn’t prevent him from finishing the work day, all of the picking through the remnants of what remains of someone else’s life, the mystery hidden therein.
Graham’s Theme from Manhunter – Michel Rubini
The director Michael Mann often gets dogged for his focus on atmosphere over story in his films: soaking everything in neon, scoring everything to moody synthesizer and undertones; they’d say his prioritization of mood was a bad thing. However that never sounded like a critique to me, more a badge of honor:
The lush green of the Hudson Valley, its wildlife, the wind swings of its seasons; the vast socioeconomic range of its inhabitants; the crumbling river towns and sprawling dairy farms; its proximity to New York, and that never-ending clash of cultures; the slow hum of anger provided by the union workers, cops, and firefighters that commute day in, day out to New York—regarding my novel, these elements, this atmosphere, feel as integral as any character or plot. It’s the atmosphere that validates and heightens everything; without it, everything would fall flat.
George Michaels – Father Figure
I, like many of my millennial counterparts, distrust earnestness, misconstruing too many of my human interactions through a veil of irony draped across the world by the internet with which we’ve come to know it.
Later in FG, Vic’s grown-up son, Junior, meets a friend at a skatepark/roller rink that’s based on this skatepark/roller rink I used to go to in Accord, New York; a wholesome place that used to elicit this exact discomfort within me. All those sober, smiling people Roller-skating away their Friday nights to Chumbawumba? Creed? George Michaels? The way it unsettled me always unsettled me in another way; I set off on the page trying to figure out exactly why..
I don’t know if I found the answer, writing that chapter. But that’s fine, more than fine: the act of discovery being much more compelling than invention, in my opinion, with art, the search should always take precedent over the answer. I’m still trying.
Kenny Chesney – She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy
Much later in FG, Vic listens to this song driving to work one day; at this point, he’s older, he’s rich, and his wife, Heather, doesn’t understand why he’s undertaken the work of flipping another house. She no longer thinks his tractor’s sexy… and yet he sings along, unable to break himself of the impulse to stop chasing the next windfall. The moment represents something I value above all else in art: A profanity that opens onto the profound, this moment of true peril made more perilous by the stupidity of this song.
I’m a Dboy – Lil Wayne
Atmosphere, atmosphere… My love for the mysterious natural beauty of the Hudson Valley—a constant presence throughout Foreclosure Gothic—has been forged in countless ways; and perhaps the most juvenile of these ways, the funniest to end on, is the circuitry of rural backroads we established back in high school to avoid police encounters during “blunt rides.” Cannabis still being illegal, then:
The spray of headlights, the dark grey tongue of road, the animals thought would seep in and out of the dark woods; the herds of deer, the swooping owls, the lumbering black bears, the pulsing fog of fireflies given the right time of year; now mix all of this with the anxiety and paranoia and psychedelic flickers smoking used to cause in my young mind, and it’s hard for me to deny the way these rides established how I understood where we lived, whatever hummed beyond the blackness that hugged the road.
Silly, yes, and yet, like Kenny Chesney’s song, no less profound to me.
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 in New York’s Hudson Valley. Read more: harrislahti.com.