Serpent’s Tail has just published House Rules by Heather Lewis. It’s a posthumous publication, the author took her own life in 2002, but it remains a startling and imaginative debut novel.

The protagonist of House Rules is Lee. At 15 she is expelled from boarding school and finds herself somewhat alone in the world. Unable to return to her abusive father, she finds an alternative home amongst the people of the horse show circuit in Florida, a place she remembered from her childhood.

Lee soon becomes involved with rider Tory Markham, who introduces her to Carl and Linda. These trainers are involved in a murky world of horse doping and they engage Lee, who herself enters a life of heroin addiction and violent sex.

House Rules sounds like one of those torrid pre-teen novels about girls and horses, crushes and competition, and in a funny way it is. Tory is a glamorous companion, the corrupt trainers provide a metaphor for wickedness, Lee must make her way in the world, it’s all strangely familiar territory. Yet Lewis messes everything up, instead of hope there is despair, darkness where there should be light.

Lewis’ writing is experimental, unadorned and extremely bleak. It’s not a kind of queer writing that you come across very often these days - things seem more sanitised since this book first appeared. The sex scenes are graphic and uncomfortable to read and I fear that this is an autobiographical novel. As AM Homes says in the afterword to this edition, “Her writing is about truth at all costs,” and it’s not hard to make the connection between Lee and Lewis herself. She reminds me of Sarah Kane.

House Rules was first published in 1994 and brought Lewis comparisons with William Burroughs and Kathy Acker. It placed her amongst the vanguard of the new queer writing that Serpents Tail championed in the 1990s with its superb High Risk imprint. She was an author who promised so much and left just left other books, Notice and Second Suspect. I wish she was around to write more.

House Rules by Heather Lewis
Published by: Serpents Tail
ISBN: 1852424613
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