Max Doty Interview: Domestic Horror in The House That Eats the Dead

Max Doty built a hungry house, then let a mother feed it.

Every house you live in belonged to somebody else first. Max Doty thinks that is why they unsettle us. Homes remind us of our own mortality, and American ones get bought and sold so often that you start to feel interchangeable, one more family passing through rooms that will forget you soon enough.

The House That Eats the Dead takes that queasy feeling and gives it teeth. Claire and Tom buy the dream home, the quiet suburban life, the safe haven for two children. Then fresh flowers dry up, shop bought eggs turn out hollow, and a daughter’s favourite toy goes missing. The house eats anything that was once alive, and everybody forgets the eaten thing ever existed. Everybody except the owners.

It is a Monkey’s Paw for parents, this domestic horror novel. The wish to erase the awful thing your child saw, granted, then escalated well past the point of comfort. The book began as seven posts on Reddit’s NoSleep under the name scarymaxx, where the community voted it Best Series of 2023, and it has grown into something bigger and nastier since.

Max Doty sat down with us to talk hungry houses, honest outlines, and everything we have already agreed to forget.

Max Doty Interview: Domestic Horror in The House That Eats the Dead

Your screenwriting background is often evident in your pacing. When starting a new project, do you consciously visualize scenes cinematically before you write them?

Before writing, I usually imagine the scenic action as it will play out. That said, a book, isn’t as purely visual as in a film. For example, in the middle of a scene in a novel, the character can suddenly start remembering a sad day twenty years ago when her cat was hit by a car or she had a fight with her best friend.

In a more visual medium like film, you could approximate something like this with a flashback, but it would probably feel more jarring and heavy-handed than in a novel. Especially when writing in first person, these kind of tangents pop up fairly often—and they often surprise me as the writer. Usually, if I’m in a nice workflow, I just go with it and see what the character wants to say (and if it ends up being boring and irrelevant, I can always edit it out later!)

In a past interview, you credited the screenwriting book Save the Cat with giving you a clear sense of story structure. How do you balance that structural discipline with the creative freedom necessary for literary fiction?

I like to work with an outline, but it’s not always consistent. Some are two pages, and some are twenty. I do think without any kind of structure, a writer is much more likely to hit an unexpected blockage that sinks the whole endeavor. Thinking ahead and figuring out the big plot points—major shifts in the story that move it along—pays dividends. That said, I like to love a lot of room for improvisation as I go, including adding major subplots, new characters, etc. If you over-outline and turn the whole thing into a paint-by-numbers project, it sucks the joy out of everything.

For aspiring writers who are trying to cross genres as you have from YA to games to horror, what is the most important muscle to exercise?

Whenever I enter a new genre, I start by reading. Pick five examples maybe, all fairly recently released. Figure out what readers or players of that genre are really after. If it’s horror, you’ve got to deliver scares, sure, but also a kind of deep dread that’s specific to your protagonist. You have to figure out what kind of sin or uncertainty is tearing them apart and then personify it in something dark.

If it’s YA, you probably want to deliver a kind of yearning, romance that’s full of uncertainty, a feeling of an adult world that you don’t quite understand that’s just beyond your fingertips. As you write, make sure you’re servicing those key touchstones that your audience wants. If it’s been fifty pages in your horror book without a scare, something has gone wrong. 

You’ve been active on Reddit’s NoSleep forum under the username “scarymaxx.” Did the novel’s concept originate from a short piece there, and how does the NoSleep community’s immediate feedback compare to the solitary process of writing a novel?

The House That Eats the Dead originated as a series of seven NoSleep posts; it actually won the community’s award for Best Series of 2023. If I’m going to be honest, I miss the immediate feedback from daily posting dearly. The life of a novelist, writing at a desk for months on end with little feedback, can be extremely lonely.

NoSleep is an especially nice place to post, because the readers are all role-playing, responding in character as if the story is true, so it all feels like a fun game you’re playing with a community. That said, I’ve incredibly excited to get this bigger, better version of the story out to a wider audience now and hear what people think. 

The premise involves objects being eaten by a house and erased from memory, which is a terrifying concept of loss. What emotional core do you hope readers connect with beneath the supernatural elements?

I think the novel goes through a few stages. At the outset, Claire is using the house’s power to protect her family from trauma (for example, the horror of losing a beloved pet or a young cousin.) As it progresses, her thoughts turn toward taking revenge on bullies and eventually existential threats in the form of dangerous people who are attracted to the house. This all goes to a very human desire to protect our families from harm—though this obviously takes things to an extreme.

You’ve mentioned that the novel’s central idea was sparked when your wife shushed you for talking about selling your house, warning that it would “hear” you. Can you elaborate on how that single, almost humorous moment evolved into the deeply unsettling and “hungry” presence in the book?

My wife tends to personify out house, talking to it, or making sure I don’t speak badly about it while in its presence. It’s kind of a funny ongoing joke. But humor and horror are basically cousins in my mind. Like, Ready or Not is kind of a weird inversion of Home Alone. And it’s no coincidence that two of the biggest movies of the last decade—Get Out and Weapons—were both made by former comedians. 

The house doesn’t just destroy objects; it erases them from everyone’s memory except the owners, Claire and Tom. Why was it important to add this layer of psychological and existential erasure on top of the physical consumption?

This goes back to me as a parent, occasionally wishing I could erase something traumatic that happened to my children. We all have those moments where we wish out kids hadn’t seen a neighbor abusing an animal or walked into a room where mom and dad are watching a grisly episode of The Walking Dead. The book begins as basically a Monkey’s Paw version of a parent getting that wish—and then escalating way beyond that initial concept. 

Is the house a purely malevolent force, or is it a mirror reflecting the moral compromises and hidden appetites of the family? How do you see the relationship between the house’s hunger and the characters’ pursuit of a “perfect life”?

I think the house wants to eat, and it pushes at each of the characters to feed it by appealing to their deepest desires. That said, I don’t think it ever forces anyone to do anything. It merely provides the means and encouragement of engaging of in some pretty bad behavior.

The novel’s central pivot is Claire forging an uneasy alliance with a house that attracts people willing to feed it human flesh. That is an extraordinary moral position to put a protagonist in. At what point in writing Claire’s arc did you realize she had crossed a line she couldn’t come back from, and did you feel the need to judge her for it, or was that impulse something you had to resist consciously?

For me, there’s a point where Claire is considering killing a teenager who she believes had been bullying her son. Then, right at the critical moment her humanity kicks in and she can’t go through with it. Later, though, she does kill a more deserving individual and feed him to the house. Personally, I think she did the right thing!

The house doesn’t force Claire to do anything, it simply offers. There’s a distinction between a monster that attacks and a temptation that is accepted. One blurb describes the book as being about “the sacrifices people make for stability.” How much of Claire’s journey is about horror, and how much is it about something far more uncomfortable, the very human willingness to look away from what we’ve enabled, as long as the bills are paid and the children are safe?

I think we’re willing to forgive a lot of indiscretions that people make on the altar of protecting their families. That said, other characters want to use the house to achieve their ambitions or feed ever darker desires, which feels obviously worse. By the end, Claire has a new idea of herself and her own agenda, a kind of budding vigilantism. I think it leaves her in an ethical place where some people will be cheering her on and others will be horrified.

Did you ever find yourself sympathizing with the house? Is the house evil, or is it simply hungry and is there a moral difference?

I don’t think of the house as evil at all! If anything, we learn that it’s been traumatized and tortured by humans. Beyond that, it’s not even a predator but rather a scavenger, certainly no more evil than a pet vulture or hyena. 

Only Claire and Tom, as owners, will remember what the house has consumed everyone else forgets. That asymmetry of memory is quietly one of the most disturbing ideas in the book. Is the horror of erasure of a life ceasing to exist in anyone’s mind worse than death itself? And what does it say about power that the ones who own things are always the ones who get to remember?

History is written by the victors, right? At one point, Claire begins to worry about what might happen if the house fell into the hands of a serial killer. But an even worse case might be if it was owned by a CEO or a politician. 

There’s something particular about old American houses, the creaking bones of a Victorian farmhouse, the peeling wallpaper of a mid-century colonial, the weight of everything that happened in a room before you arrived. Not every culture experiences their architecture this way. Why do you think Americans project such psychological and spiritual weight onto their homes? Is it guilt? Is it the land beneath the foundations? Or is it something about the mythology of homeownership itself, the idea that if you own a place, it somehow owes you happiness?

Houses remind us of our own mortality. We move into a new place, and we want to think of ourselves as the first and only owner. There’s something unsettling about imagining families of strangers occupying our homes—even if it was in the past. More than most places, American homes are bought and sold regularly, seldom occupied for generation after generation, and I think if you start to examine that reality, you start to feel interchangeable in a creepy way that reminds you of your own impermanence.

The house’s most terrifying rule is that it erases what it consumes from everyone’s memory except Claire and Tom’s. Given that we’re living through an era where collective memory feels increasingly fragile, and domestic facades are polished daily on social media, I have to ask, if this house existed in our world right now, do you think most people would even notice something was missing? Or have we already been feeding it without realizing?

Just to function in the world today requires a certain degree of ignoring a constant barrage of the horrific. Think about the pandemic, what we learned about our country, and what we all experienced. When I look back at that time period, there’s a kind of fog surrounding it—and I find that no one really talks about it anymore. We’ve all agreed, collectively, to forget it. It that sense, we don’t really need a supernatural entity to erase the people and events that make us squirm: we’re happy to forget without any help.

The House That Eats the Dead: A darkly outrageous supernatural horror novel about the price of a perfect life
by Max Doty

A family moves into their dream home – only to discover that it hides an insatiable hunger – in this dread-laced and darkly outrageous domestic horror novel.

‘Doty’s devilishly voracious novel ended up devouring me’
– Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Devil Inside

‘ Nasty, smart, satisfying, and enormously fun’
– Scott Hawkins, author of The Library at Mount Char and Blacktail

The new house is a fresh start for Claire and her family. It’s a move towards the quiet suburban life she has craved since her turbulent childhood; a step up the corporate ladder for her husband, Tom; and a safe haven for their two children.

Yet, as they unpack their boxes, she senses something is wrong . . .

Fresh flowers dry up, store-bought eggs are inexplicably hollow and her daughter’s favourite toy disappears. Claire soon confronts a series of impossible truths: the house is hungry. It’s devouring anything that was once alive. And only Claire and Tom, the owners of the house, will remember that this ‘food’ ever existed.

When Claire exploits the house’s power in a moment of weakness, she and the house forge a fragile bond. But as its hunger intensifies and Claire starts to lose control, she fears who else might be drawn to her home – and what sinister appetites they’ll bring.

‘Deliciously unhinged’
– Leigh Radford, author of One Yellow Eye

Grady Hendrix meets The Shining in this darkly fun supernatural horror novel. Perfect for fans of A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher and Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison.

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