Sunday 31 May 2020

"Armageddon House" by Michael Griffin


Armageddon House

by Michael Griffin

A review


If I hadn’t pre-ordered Armageddon House in early March, before the Covid pandemic escalated, I would have easily believed that this novella was inspired by the lockdown.  It starts in medias res, presenting us with two couples of sorts – Mark and Jenna, Greyson and Polly – living in a hi-tech underground bunker.  Their subterranean world has all the necessities they require.  There’s a well-equipped kitchen, a gym and swimming pool, a tavern and even a sort of museum.  There’s food to last many a lifetime and unspecified “medication” which they need to take on a daily basis.  Away from the outside world, these characters try to hold on to their sanity by sticking to well-established routines.

Are these four characters the last survivors of some apocalyptic disaster? Are they human guinea pigs in a strange experiment?  They don’t know and we don’t know either.  Mark – from whose perspective we seem to see things – suffers from strange memory gaps, perhaps induced by the medication.  There are glimpses of hazy memories, hints suggesting a very different past.  The quartet explore the levels of the bunker, trying to understand their situation and to possibly find a means of escape. We look on, as lost and perplexed as they are.        

At first, this book reads like a literary equivalent of the “Big Brother” reality show.  In close, enforced confinement, tempers fray, tensions simmer, occasionally overstepping into violence. Friendships are made and unmade, desire waxes and wanes.  As the novella progresses, however, we realise that the claustrophobic horror portrayed does not exist merely an individual level, but also on a cosmic one. Tellingly, Griffin slips in references to Norse sagas. Whilst these mythical undertones initially seem out of place in a sci-fi scenario, they suggest that Armageddon House should be read as an existential fable, possibly representing our constant struggle to understand the human predicament – Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

Whether the book works for you or not depends, of course, on what scale of “weird” you like your “fiction” to be.  In some ways, Griffin’s novella reminded me of I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman.  I feel that, like Harpman’s book, Armageddon House is a “novel(la) as thought experiment”.  Narratively, it leaves too many questions unanswered.  I find this frustrating but other readers, of course, might not – some might even delight in the ambiguities.  Beyond the bare bones of the plot, however, the novella raises haunting, philosophical questions which cannot be easily dismissed and this is where its strength lies.   

Kindle Edition73 pages
Published May 12th 2020 by Undertow Publications     

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