Our Strange and Wonderful House (novel)
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Our Strange and Wonderful House was an experimental collaborative prose work created on Ficly by a large number of writers, starting from a premise and format established by Zxvasdf. Although not conceived of as a novel at its inception, but was termed one by the foreword of the 2022 ebook edition of it, edited by Aristide Twain. Although she was not the main character, Jenny Everywhere, in several incarnations, recurred several times through the book.
Instead of any singular narrative, Our Strange and Wonderful House was made up of a series of vignettes describing, or centering on, various areas of the titular sentient, impossibly vast, shifting House. Many, though by no means all, of its Chapters and Appendices were written in the second person, putting the reader in the shoes of an otherwise-unseen visitor exploring the house. We have elected not to give character pages to these figures, so as to avoid having to make judgment calls about the degree to which the "Yous" of various individual parts should be considered the same continuous character.
Contents
Plot
Welcome!
An individual welcomes a group of writers who have gathered to participate in a “challenge”. They explain that what they are actually to do is to participate in the creation of a Strange and Wonderful House, whose blueprints, infinite in proportions, are currently blank.
Chapter 1: The Courtyard
After stepping through a portal of some sort, an individual finds themself in the Courtyard of the House, facing the gates of the estate proper, which appear to be made of a glowing golden metal, but are actually made of transparent tubing containing a multitude of luminous insects milling about, fulfilling unknown tasks. The gates open of their own accord and the visitor steps through as the portal sings behind them.
Chapter 2: The Anteroom
The visitor reaches the Anteroom, lit by a chandelier on which small groups of fairies dance. A pillar of cold light, burning fairy dust, occupies the centre of the circular room, a portal that will transport whoever steps into it to the room of their choice. The visitor steps into the light.
Chapter 3: The Pleasure Pad of Federico Ruiz
The Pleasure Pad of Federico Ruiz, the decadent domed leisure area overseen by Federico Ruiz is described.
Chapter 4: The Catamaran Loos of Oceania
The Catamaran Loos of Oceania, the House's bathroom, which contain an entire ocean, with the actual plumbing in the centre of a boat sailing the quiet nightly sea, are described.
Chapter 5: The Library
The lady Elshanor returns to Hawk Manor after a lengthy absence. Walking through the incredibly dusty corridors, she makes her way to Hawk Manor's Library, where she finds a strange, shimmering portal which appears to lead to another library, that of a mysterious infinite house.
Appendix 5-I: The Other Side
In Hawk Manor's library, Alastair is skulking in a dark corner, bemoaning Elshanor's absence. He suddenly sees the portal shimmer; though he gets his knife up, he quickly sees that the woman stepping through is in fact Elshanor. However, almost as quickly, he realises it is not quite the Elshanor he knew. The two stare at each other in shock.
Appendix 5-II: The Bathroom (of the Library)
Elshanor steps into the Library of the Strange and Wonderful House, immediately noticing that the floorboards are as creaky as the doors of Hawk Manor's library. She walks through the Library to find a metallic door curiously ill-fitting for the decor of the room, which turns out to be the gleaming library bathroom, impossibly spotless, in stark contrast to the dust of the library. She notices a paperback copy of Les Misérables and debates taking it back to its proper place, but her musings are interrupted by another creaking sound in the room behind her.
Chapter 6: The Theater Room
The Theater Room is described. It is a haunting place where the unwary visitor may lose their freedom and sanity as they find themselves drawn into the dance of the inhuman “players” wearing human faces, with them soon performing for the players' amusement instead of the players for the visitor's — and in more permanent terms, the players are “always looking for fresh blood”.
Chapter 7: The Coat Room
The Coat Room is described. Its appearance changes from “warm and cloying” to “large and drafty” as needed, with the staff changing from Dwarves to Titans to match. Although it is possible not to call on the services of these changeable valets, the Coat Room is apparently so huge that many become lost for weeks on end, forced to survive off scraps; “on many occasions bleached bones of owners are found mere yards from their coats”.
Chapter 8: The Closet in the Sitting Room
The narration promises that inside the Closet in the Sitting Room is a portal to Narnia – and indeed that one could get to Narnia from any closet. However, the Closet in the Sitting Room is designed as a test to this faith: although it does actually lead to Narnia too, this is not immediately apparent because there is a further doorway disguised as the back wall of the closet.
Chapter 9: Hallway – PI3
An unnamed “I”, visiting the House for what seems to be the first time, but whose brother was familiar (or possibly contributed to) the blueprints, makes their way through Hallway - P13 Served by a lift – not an elevator, just a vertical shaft with a very forceful updraft – this organically curved hallway, whose floor glows a soft blue, provides access to the Observatory through an “elegant door of dark wood”. The visitor reaches this door and gently taps it.
Chapter 10: The Observatory
After the complex locking system opens the door, the visitor enters the Observatory, a high-tech circular room with a reclining chair in the centre. The visitor is greeted by the A.I. overseeing the Observatory, who introduces herself as “’Ana”. She explains that the Observatory allows residents of the House to observe “space and time”. When the visitor asks what the chair with its joysticks is for, she very casually replies that it is used “to control the lasers, of course”.
Chapter 11: Every House Needs One
Rennik, apparently attending some kind of party at the House, visits the men's room, which turns out to have rather curious gravity, such that men amuse themselves by trying to aim for the urinals while standing upside-down on the ceiling. Another of the men asks Rennik where and when the party he comes from is happening, leading to some confusion between impossible rooms as Rennik and his interlocutor mix up the 3rd floor basement with the 2nd floor attic past the tennis courts.
Chapter 12: The Dining Room
The Dining Room of the House is described. It adapts itself, with the décor, entertainment, and cuisine all being appropriate for the diner’s expectations. That nobody else might perceive what you do is not a problem.
Chapter 13: The Guardroom
A visitor enters the Guardroom, where a number of heavily-armed men watch over the locked, reinforced door that leads through to the Conservatory. One guard asks them if they want to go through, telling them “Better you than me” when they acquiesce.
Appendix 13-I: The Conservatory
The visitor glances through the bars of the door to the Conservatory and is unsettled by what they see, but stick to their plan of visiting it. The guardsman outfits them with full armour similar to the guards', complete with a metal rake for a weapon, before sending them cautiously onwards.
Appendix 13-II: View From a Jungle
The visitor enters the eerie jungle. Strewn about are panes of glass; through some of them beams of sunlight come to nourish the plant-life, while others are windows into other areas of the house. For example, one is the party in the “roughly-finished basement”, another is an elegant and studious woman strolling with melancholy through a “tattered” library, and “a fantastical bacchanal led by a grinning imp”. The visitor tries to refocus, making their best efforts to stay on the path, but suddenly a cackling voice finished a train of thought for them with the word “Mad!”. Without hesitation, the visitor identifies this as the voice of the gardener.
Appendix 13-III: Back to the Garden
The visitor is being chased through the beautiful garden by the Mad Gardener, who wields a machete even as he sings in a “deep but strangely serene voice”. As they run, the visitor also catches a glimpse of the Gardener's reflection in one of the panes of glass — not an old man with a machete, but a a creature with a great many wings bearing a flaming sword.
Appendix 13-IV: The Madman
Still chased by the Mad Gardener, the visitor takes a wrong turn and, running out of path, ends up reluctantly running out of the marked path and into the foliage. There, they soon reach a dead end, their way cut off by a wall of glass panels which soon reflect a vision of horror: the Mad Gardener's true angelic form morphing into a demonic one. The Gardener manages to plant the machete in the chest of the visitor's body armour, though it holds and they are not injured. Keeping them on the ground, the Gardener yanks out the machete and prepares to behead the visitor.
Appendix 13-V: The Saviour
The Mad Gardener's machete blow is blocked unexpected by a steel spade held by another man who wears body armour under a long coat, “camouflaged with paints in green and brown and various twigs and leaves”. As they circle each other, dueling like swordsmen with their respective unlikely weapon, the Mad Gardener seems to recognise the other, whom he calls Grigori. The other angel replies that the Gardener has “succumbed to the madness”, and asks him to please surrender now rather than make this harder than it has to be. Naturally, the Gardener refuses, tackling Grigori with an animalistic shriek and attempting to stab him.
Appendix 13-VI: The Gardener
Avoiding the Mad Gardener's blows, Grigori beheads him before saying a few words over his body. Introducing himself as a Gardener himself, he then tells the baffled visitor to hurry away with him, lest they fall pray to other entities who might be attracted by the scent of blood.
Chapter 14: I Am An Athenaeum
In verse rather than prose, an Athenaeum describes its own nature and function in the first person — where a library is a place for reading, an athenaeum is a place of social learning. The athenaeum of the House is implied to connect to all others, in the fashion of Pratchett’s L-Space.
Chapter 15: The Stairwell
The Stairwell, a spiral staircase starting near the front door and going upwards, is described. These stairs, built when the President of Zimbabwe complained about the lack of stairs and opened on “the first day of Spring”, pass through “an infinite number of portals, spanning the width and depth of the house”. The supports are in the shape of animal limbs, and each stone step represents a ley line. Every four steps is a doorway. The doors go up to the front door of the Attic, but they also go beyond it — and at the very top, there is a golden gate surrounded by “dry ice tended to by the very highest of the goblins”. It is closed, and a sign hanging from the padlock states: “If you have made it here, then you only deserve to fall, for a life wasted is not a life lived in Good.”.
Chapter 16: The Throne Room
Having followed the portals, Elshanor arrives in the Throne Room, where fifty diverse thrones sit against three of the four stone walls. She immediately recognises the throne meant for her, a silver-set, royal-blue-velvet-padded one. As soon as she sits down, her throne becomes the head throne, and a man is sent through as a disembodied voice explains that he stole waters from the Fountain of Youth and calls on Elshanor to judge him. Two buttons, one white and one red, have appeared on the arm-rests. She looks and into his eyes chooses the red, for guilt. A portal opens beneath the man's feet and he plummets into Pandemonium.
Chapter 17: The Portal to Pandemonium
Rohinder, judged in the previous chapter, falls through the portal and ends up in the middle of the great, golden hall of Pandemonium, which he finds to be “just as Milton described it”. Through “black fire light” he sees another throne, higher and golden, and sitting within it “the most beautiful and deadly angel anyone had ever cast eyes on”, who booms: “So your judgement has been placed? Well, I suppose that now it is time for your punishment.”
Chapter 18: The Jenny Everywhere Museum
The Jenny Everywhere Museum is described. It is a wing of the House that was set aside for Jenny Everywhere by the Architect itself to use as a museum for herselves and her friends – and, possibly, as a storeroom for random junk she may have acquired while wandering the universes. “Known contents” are said to include:
- Statues of friends, companions and family of Jenny from throughout the worlds.
- Three perpetual motion machines.
- A copy of the Voynich Manuscript, annotated in “a completely different alien language from the manuscript itself”.
- A miniature city preserved from “a dead world”.
- A key to the gate of Eromreven.
- A battlesuit from the Third War of Ascension on Earth-33.
- A portrait of Jenny painted by Leonardo Da Vinci in the 19th century on Earth-274, where Da Vinci became a vampire.
- A floating pirate ship.
- A “maze of twisty little passages, all alike”.
- A zoo with various endangered species including unicorns, vegetable lambs and giant balloon animals.
- A lock of red hair.
- The skull of an Elder God.
- An item marked simply as [REDACTED].
Appendix 18-I: The Jenny Everywhere Museum (cont'd)
Two further items within the Museum are listed. The first is “a bottle filled with a miniature universe” containing the story of Kal-el”. The second is a computer linked to “our” universe's Internet, allowing her to set up her own website, ficly.com.
Chapter 19: The Ruined Chapel
The Ruined Chapel is described. It may be accessed by leaving the House proper by “the back door of the Conservatory” and taking the path between the Dark Wood and the Tarn. There, before its altar bearing a statue of a headless, hands-less woman, is the Lady in Mourning, a mysterious, ghostly figure in perpetual grief, wearing a black veil that goes down to her feet. To a visitor who distracts her from her despair via something like a story or a song, she will answer any question, except for her name. The altar is surrounded by ashes that are all that is left of visitors who looked upon her unveiled face — for every night, at midnight, she lifts it up to cry out “Woe unto they who once stood on high! Their temples are in ruins and their names are forgotten.”.
Appendix 19-I: The Right Wrong Questions
An old, wandering mendicant in dusty, tattered clothing, evidence of “a long and arduous journey”, comes to the narthex and impresses the Lady in Mourning with a “beautiful and haunting song of despair and decay” before kneeling and asking her if her name is “Catherine”. She answers no, he sings another song, asks her if her name is “Osceola”, and so on and so forth as he peacefully spends the last years of his life trying to find out the Lady's name, retreating each night around midnight (when she unveils so lethally) to gather food and drink from the wilds near the Tarn. Eventually, he passes away, a last “smiling” question on his lips. At midnight, the Lady, instead of her usual refrains, looks up towards the stars to sing “a song of hope and dreams”. The next morning, the Chapel has lost its aura of melancholy, and the Lady in Mourning has gone, as has the statue on the altar.
Chapter 20: The Stationery Room
The Stationery Room, accessible only to the Master of the House and those to whom he gives permission, is described. Unlike many other rooms in the House, which are “fluid in their relative locations”, the Stationery (or Stationary) Room always exists at the center of “an imaginary line between the Master Bedroom and the Gatehouse, always maintaining equal distance from the two”. The Room itself is “somewhat small”, with a single desk sitting in the center, facing the door. At its back is a window covered by heavy curtains, and all the walls are covered in bookshelves and, in one carner, a large cabinet. The desk contains an infinite supply of “papers, envelopes, inks, pens and waxes”.
Chapter 21: Elevator
Until recently, the House did not have an elevator, but the Great Glass Elevator has crashed into the west garden and the sentient House interprets it as a donation, gearing up to absorb the elevator into itself by opening various doorways into empty elevator shafts. Despite the objections of the goblins who guard the Stairwell, work by the lawn gnomes to repair the Elevator and install it in the House is well underway, and the House's excitement is such that it is “buzzing with excitement and creaking with worry, lurching, stretching, and then settling” to unprecedented degrees; “there is a continuous seance on the 7th floor to keep spirits and demons out of closets and cupboards”.
Worldbuilding
Jenny Everywhere
- Not being limited to a single sequential human lifetime, various incarnations of Jenny Everywhere both passed through the House and settled down to live within it.
- One version was acquainted with the Architect, who gave her an entire wing to turn into the Jenny Everywhere Museum. The Museum is visited and filled out by many other incarnations of Jenny, with only Jennies and those they vet being allowed in.
- One version of Jenny was of humbler status within the House, interviewing to become one of its Maids.
- A friend of Jenny's (in an unspecified incarnation) was told about the House by Jenny in great detail prior to visiting it herself in The Doorbell.
- Although she is never explicitly referred to as a Jenny, “Guardian of the Ink Wells”, also known as “Inkstain”, is “a small teenaged girl (…) dressed in a robe and aviator goggles”, and she has a red-haired, freckled friend have a teleportation misadventure. She states when asked that Inkstain is not her real name, but does not disclose the latter.
- A Jenny witnesses the eventual fall of the house, later reappearing in the epilogue PROSE: Overgrown.
Laura Drake
- A lock of red hair kept as a memento is among the items in the Jenny Everywhere Museum.
- The “Guardian of the Ink Wells” has a friend nicknamed Treefrog who sports red hair and freckles.
Universes
- Most of the story takes place in the Strange and Wonderful House, which is “larger than most universes” and seems to connect to a number of alternative realities, though its exterior is physically located in a universe.
- Elshanor and Alastair are from another universe.
- Among the items within the Jenny Everywhere Museum are a miniature city from “a dead world”, a battlesuit from the Third War of Ascension on “Earth-33”, a portrait of Jenny painted by Leonardo Da Vinci in the 19th century on “Earth-274”, “a bottle filled with a miniature universe ”, and a computer allegedly linked to “our” universe's Internet via “clever multi-dimensional ITeching”.
Other
- Will-o'-wisps are found in the Courtyard.
- The Pleasure Pad of Federico Ruiz is compared to “a pearl on the red rock of Mars”.
- The wealthy and decadent residents of the Pleasure Pad relax on “large cushions embroidered from the silk of mutated spiders”.
- According to the author's comments of Chapter 3, the Pleasure Pad is not actually “the seedy underbelly of the House” because that name is better applied to “the illegal underground greenhouse”.
- Among the books kept in Hawk Manor's library are various Ficlets works and the Ficlinomicon, which needs to be kept in a case wrapped with chains.
- Walking back into her dusty, long-abandoned home makes Elshanor feel “like Pip in Great Expectations”.
- Hallway - P13 is described as having contours rather than angles “in Apple fashion”.
- Among other things, the Dining Room can appear as “the viking halls of Valhalla”, with a ceiling “thatched with golden shields”; as “a festival held in a vast Byzantine palace”; or as a pub where one might listen to Iron Maiden. One “may hear Whitesnake on the jukebox or a Skald reciting Grímnismál”.
Continuity
- PROSE: Overgrown served as an epilogue to the story (and is incorporated as such into the 2022 edition). It did not take place in or near the Strange and Wonderful House, but revealed the fate of the House seed introduced in Chapter 60: The Fall of the Strange and Wonderful House as the last remnant of the House after its destruction.
- In PROSE: Morning After, while suffering from shifter hangover (a condition that caused memories of her other selves to bleed into her mind involuntarily and blur with her own), Jenny remembered that “we had a house (…) once, (…) a vast and ever-changing palace, strange and wonderful and alive”.
Behind the scenes
Read online
The original prose pieces making up Our Strange and Wonderful House can be found on Ficly, although a number of Appendices and a handful of Chapters are not listed as part of the Challenge and must be sought out individually. The 2022 annotated, collected ebook edition of Our Strange and Wonderful House can be read online for free on Issuu or downloaded for free as a PDF or an ePub.
Watch online
A video trailer for the story was made by Aristide Twain and is available for viewing on Youtube.
