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His new book, the tightly written, claustrophobic thriller The Farm, concerns the suspicious events surrounding a young womanвЂ™s disappearance from a rural Swedish community, and is told from the perspective of a woman who may be having a psychotic episode. ItвЂ™s something that Smith does exceptionally well, too. House, already at work on a new cycle of novels that features two men who exploit a misconception that theyвЂ™re gay to take advantage of others, is great at conjuring place, and the locations of The Kills - from Iraq and Turkey to Malta, Naples, Cyprus, and the Chicago suburbs - are described in richly detailed, evocative prose that fully immerses the reader in the places he describes.

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What does it mean to be вЂoutside?вЂ™ Because itвЂ™s a position we all exploit in some way-we choose when and where and how to identify ourselves, and it becomes problematic when youвЂ™re not able to control that.вЂќ

вЂњI think is really present, but not in the most obvious way. вЂњItвЂ™s a relatively recent position for a writer to be in,вЂќ agrees House. There is none of the macho boysвЂ™ club swagger that excites the best-seller lists. Their characters are sometimes gay, sometimes straight, and approach life from the perspective of outsiders.

Like Smith, HouseвЂ™s work reflects a broader shift away from coming-out narratives that have long dominated - and constrained - our notion of what gay writers write about.

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The book is full of such riddles (sometimes too much so). This time itвЂ™s a ghostly detail from a fleeting glimpse of a different American student (we assume) who may or may not have been the victim of a horrific murder that may or may not have happened. Take, for example, the first book, Sutler, which features a gay American student traveling around Turkey wearing a T-shirt adorned with a star a similar T-shirt materializes in the third book, The Kill, set in Naples among a cast of drifters and immigrants. The opening premise of The Kills - a manhunt sparked by a deadly explosion in an Iraqi military camp - sets the tone for an unnerving sequence of books within the book, in which various stories intersect and dissolve, characters lead us down blind alleys (or disappear), and motifs ping-pong eerily from one book to another. Like fellow gay writer Tom Rob Smith, whose debut, Child 44, was an international bestseller (a film adaptation, starring Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace, is coming to the big screen this fall), House has taken a familiar form and made it fresh, in large part by bringing his own perspective to the writing. With its dense plotting across four interconnected novels, The Kills, published stateside by Picador on August 4, is not a typical thriller, but it has the pace and energy associated with the genre and itвЂ™s already being compared to the work of John le CarrГ©.

Today, literary novelists like Alan Hollinghurst, Michael Cunningham, and Sarah Waters routinely challenge the idea that being gay limits a bookвЂ™s success - they are out, and so are many of their characters, but until now genre fiction has been slow to catch up. If they resisted identifying as gay novelists, they were seen as ashamed or self-interested, but if they embraced the label, they were admitting themselves to a ghetto. Well-intentioned or otherwise, it had the effect of putting gay writers in a quandary. Although non-gay readers might pick up James BaldwinвЂ™s GiovanniвЂ™s Room or maybe peruse the odd Edmund White title, the implication was clear: Gay writers and readers were not part of fictionвЂ™s mainstream. Only a decade a go, the best a gay reader could expect from a bookstore was a discreet вЂњgayвЂќ section, ostracized from the general fiction shelves. Perversely, itвЂ™s the inconsequentiality of his sexuality that makes what heвЂ™s done so consequential. House is gay, writing in a genre (the thriller) typically regarded as the preserve of straight male writers. When Richard HouseвЂ™s multilayered, four-part novel The Killswas nominated for last yearвЂ™s Booker Prize, writer Philip Hensher singled it out as the contender that everyone ought to read, вЂњa thrilling, overwhelming rideвЂ¦full of lucid action, drifting contemplation, apparent dead-ends, confusion, and thuggish explosions.вЂќ It is all those things, but the most interesting thing about HouseвЂ™s success may also be the thing that matters least: his sexual orientation.