The 13th House by Adam Zameenzad (Fourth Estate)

“Traditionally The Twelve Houses of the Zodiac are called mundane houses because they refer to every day life on earth activities.”

“Not much is said about The Thirteenth House”.

The 13th House is narrated by an unnamed person in the beginning. As the story progresses, we learn the narrator is someone close to Zahid. The narrator is the son of the man Zahid’s father worked for and embezzled from. It is the narrator who makes the story flow as he describes Zahid’s descent into his own private hell. We also learn the complicated story of the narrator as he also becomes a victim of the “Thirteenth House”.

As the narrator explains it, the Thirteenth House is “the house of perpetual pain and therefore no pain; the house of perpetual darkness and therefore no darkness; the house of perpetual despair and therefore no despair.”

So begins Adam Zameenzad’s story of a man named Zahid who has suffered much in life. He doesn’t understand his wife Jamila, he lost his first two sons at an early age, he is trod upon by his employer, and the political situation in Pakistan where he now resides is not one of peace and harmony. 

Zahid has two other children - a seven-year old daughter named Azra and a four-year old son who is not named in the novel and doesn’t seem to be quite normal. His parents had already passed away. He remembers his father as a kind and gentle man but ran away from home with a woman of “ill-repute” and was also discovered to have embezzled money from his employer. His mother was a hard-worker bringing up five children on her own and “would slap him each time he asked for anything, and advised him in a hard, grating voice to go and get it from his good-for-nothing thief of a father, wherever he was.” 

Zahid feels that his luck is about to change. He has found a new home to rent in a nice neighborhood in Karachi. A larger house than the room he currently lives in with his wife and two children. The joys of moving into a larger home and at a bargain price. So what if there are ‘stories’ about the house. What could go wrong? In Japan, this house would be considered a wake ari bukken which is a “discounted property due to special circumstances”, a stigmatized property.

Zahid was not bothered by what people said about the house. It took him a little while to convince his wife that it was the right thing to do for the family. She reluctantly gives into his wishes even though she believes the house contains some evil power.

What happens in the house is enough to make anyone believe that it is “evil”. A good friend is shot by the police in the home, Zahid’s wife is seduced by some religious guru, and most shocking of all, is what happens to the narrator and Zahid himself. 

This is Adam Zameenzad’s first novel. He is a Pakistani-born British writer. He was born and educated in Pakistan, lived in Kenya, Canada, and the U.S. before moving to the U.K. He has created a novel that makes you think of the absurdities of life and how people blame it on superstitions and other supernatural suppositions. It is you, the reader, to decide, was it just bad luck and misfortune that fell upon Zahid or did he bring it upon himself as an unwitting pawn in the circle of life. ~Ernie Hoyt