It is possible to develop an idea about what Francesca Lia Block is hoping to accomplish with her 2022 novel, House of Hearts, by reading the chapter subtitles before reading the first page. For that matter, one may well understand what the intent is here simply by being familiar with the song lyrics used as epigraphs even before the listing of those chapter subtitles. Those lyrics quote the P.J. Harvey song, "To Bring You My Love." This decision sets in motion a fairly recognizable pattern which is made manifest with just a handful of those subtitles: "Jennifer's Body," "Heart-Shaped Box," and "Losing My Religion."
House of Hearts is an exercise in pop culture pseudo-horror. Every one of these pop culture references as well as most of the others allude to a certain indefinable sense of ill-defined discomfort and disquiet. The songs by Nirvana and R.E.M. are not lyrically connected to the female-empowerment teen horror flick about a girl named Jennifer, but they all share a connection by the emotional response they inspire. The story told in the novel is about a young woman named Izzy Ames and her soulmate since high school, Cyrus Rivera. One morning Cyrus goes missing and nobody seems much interested in finding out what happened to him. Nobody whose job is to do that, at least.
At this point, it is worth noting that the author released a limited-edition audiobook on vinyl as if it were a rock album. This detail is not incidental. The novel itself wants to be a concept album. Boiled down to essentials, it is a story of Izzy taking upon herself the job of finding out what happened to Cyrus. This search is interrupted by the introduction of a musician genuinely named Ever Fontana. In the chapter titled "California Love" the titular entity is described as “The House of Hearts Retreat Center: Heal from Grief and Childhood Trauma with Sky Larkin L.S.W.” So, Izzy's odyssey takes her from a missing Cyrus to a New Age guru named Sky to a musician genuinely named Ever Fontana.
The opening paragraph of the chapter titled "Bluebeard" is a typical example of the prose found in the book. "The next morning, Izzy woke wet-eyed. She dragged the back of her hand across her face, feeling the cold metal of the silver ring against her hot skin. She would not let herself cry for him. She would not cry. It would mean he was really gone." Far more time has gone into crafting lyrical sentences than into creating dimensional characters existing within a realistic presentation of the world. That the book is barely 230 pages long is indicative of the thin quality of the narrative.
One might well expect that the story contained within the relatively short read builds into a full-throttle search for the missing love of Izzy's life. Furthermore, one might well expect that when the truth about what happened to Cyrus is finally revealed it will come as a cathartic emotional climax. The clues to what to actually expect are hidden in plain sight. For many people—especially those of the author's generation—it is very difficult to think of R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion" without envisioning its iconic, award-winning video. That video does not have much of a literal connection to the lyrics, but it successfully integrates with the music to create this strange sense of disquiet and unease. This sensation is produced by many of the songs whose titles are chapter subtitles to this volume. The effect of reading the book is more akin to that of listening to a concept album.
