The Death House

I really enjoyed The Death House. Well, maybe enjoyed isn't quite the right word, but I was engaged by it, and appreciated it.

The obvious reference point, for me, was Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. This book has a similar feeling of doomed youngsters trying to make sense of their situation. And also has a similar level of unlikeliness if you think about it too hard. It's a bit more YA-ish, and not as literary, but there's always the same feeling that things aren't likely to end well.

There is some terrible genetic disease, which affects small numbers of children, and those who are found to be Defective are isolated in a large remote house, where they essentially just wait for the disease to become active, at which point they are shipped off to the sanatorium and never seen again.

It's a fairly short book, and didn't take me long to read, and I thought it was really very good.