Ostensibly a thriller, and marketed as such, The Kills (Picador, slated for release in the US August 2) is instead a thoroughly weird and uncategorizable book (or, rather, collection of four books) that centers around an Iraqi waste-burning facility and a housing complex in Naples, among other things and places. Indeed, all it has in common with a genre mainstay like the Bourne franchise is a certain geographic restlessness. “If I were a thriller aficionado, I’d be screaming,” House admits. “It’s a much slower book, and I’m trusting a reader’s going to be able to finish off what’s left untied.” It’s a suitably porous, untidy structure for The Kills’s basic topic, which is the clusterfuck of broken promises, mangled finances, and bureaucratic intrigues that constituted the Iraq War. The many-tentacled octopus at the heart of it all is HOSCO, a Halliburton-style company providing all sorts of services to the occupying forces. As Geezler, one of its principles (and the closest character to a villain that The Kills has) explains, “We started out doing one thing and we’ve ended up doing everything. I’m not saying we’re greedy. I’m saying we’re promiscuous.”
Book one, Sutler, introduces the titular character—under a HOSCO-provided pseudonym—a contractor who is plopped down in the Iraqi desert and charged with converting a wasteland of garbage burn-pits into a fully functional, utopian-leaning city. The only problem is that this project (dubbed The Massive, which is the title of the second book) doesn’t really exist, except perhaps as a pretense for siphoning cash from government contracts. House’s saga proceeds in a fairly straight line through the first two books—the life of contractors coexisting with the military, the daily dangers and boredom, the horrific health effects of breathing in medical waste incinerated with jet fuel—centering around a staggering embezzlement scheme. Sutler, the presumptive fall guy, goes on the run.
There’s an abrupt tonal shift by the third book, which is set in Naples: The Iraq War plotline disappears entirely in the third chunk of the novel, and instead we’re in the middle of an Italian murder story, rife with false accusations, a mysterious pair of foreign brothers, and a basement chamber whose plastic-coated walls are covered in blood. This third installment (The Kill, singular) was the first part that House wrote. He was inspired, he says, by the Italian thriller writer Leonardo Sciascia— specifically, the 1971 novel Equal Danger. While The Kill is fairly stand-alone, references to its story are dotted throughout the first two books, and the basic plot is an integral part of the final section, which is set in Cyprus. If this all sounds confusing, it is—but never in a ponderous way, and never at the expense of old-fashioned, plot-based entertainment, especially for the final, climactic book, which is particularly evocative and quasi-cinematic.
House—who received an MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago and was a member of the social-practice-oriented collective Haha—has no direct connection to the world of military contractors, and while he often travels to research his novels, he has not been to Iraq. “It’s widely out of my experience, that’s true,” he says. “It was just post-Iraq War, with all the evaluation that was going on, and I started asking myself, Why was I so complacent, really?” It’s fitting, then, that much of The Kills has to do with responsibility, and with the shadowy task of assigning blame (and how that task is often obscured by the news media and official narratives). While the specific details in the novels are fabricated, House says they do hew closely enough to the type of scams that unfolded during the Iraq War, a situation that he says was “open to abuse—and in fiction you can explode those possibilities.” It’s a world in which individual characters are often powerless in the face of a military-industrial machine that might never be reined in, despite heroic efforts. “It’s bigger than those intentions,” House says. “I was trying to play off scale—the same with [HOSCO henchman] Geezler: a small, destructive element, but equally as tiny against this massive, massive thing.”
In a typical thriller, the world is presented as an intensely complicated array of conspiracies, alliances, and stratagems, a thicket through which the protagonist runs, hacks, shoots, and kills. By the finale, the swamp of false leads and red herrings has generally resolved into something clearer: a bad guy, a victory, international terrorism foiled by a high-speed chase on a European highway. The Kills is more like a realist thriller in that it refuses to solve its own mystery so cleanly. Its questions are fairly simple—who took all that money, and where the hell did that person go?—but ultimately the world remains hugely complex, and unknowable, as always.
A version of this article appears in the July/August 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
