Bruno Fischer’s House of Flesh is a book we’ve been meaning to read for a while. The title has always intrigued us, and the creepy cover art on its 1951 Gold Medal edition by C.C. Beale has always caught our eyes. The story deals with a professional basketball player named Harry Wilde who goes for rest and peace in an upstate New York town, but instead walks into northeastern gothic when he falls for strange and exotic Lela Doane, whose veterinarian husband may have murdered his first wife and fed her to his vicious dogs. When Harry and Lela’s affair is found out, he comes to think her husband is planning a canine ending for Lela too, but those two have a relationship that Harry can only dimly grasp.
With this central plot, plus Harry’s lusty ex-wife Gale, the local girl Polly he spurns for his dangerous affair, a painter who creates non-consensual nudes of women who posed for him clothed, the subtext of mating animals, and a general aura of torpid sexuality, the title of this book works on multiple levels, as the veneers of a local town are peeled back to their base layers. It’s a time-honored theme: nothing is quite what it seems. House of Flesh is an imperfectly written but entertaining tale. You know one aspect we really liked? The whole crazy caper starts because Harry wants to board a dog in a kennel. As unusual set-ups go, that’s thinking outside the box.
