There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House

Stop! Don't touch the fence. Don't unlock the door. And whatever you do, don't look at anything in the library --because this house keeps itself occupied. Imagine the house: Pristine, fully furnished--and yet it stands abandoned in a Detroit neighborhood full of vacant tear-downs. Try as they might, overqualified contractor Glenn (and his well-meaning buddy, less-qualified, Lennie) can't get inside: Go through the front door, and you immediately tumble out the back, without passing through the rooms between. Things get complicated when Glenn accidentally finds a way to enter the house--because there are impossible views out the windows, very unlikely books on the shelves, a severed foot on the mantle, and worse. Now his crooked boss has abruptly sold the place to a pair of crooked cops. ...And Glenn has discovered what dwells in the crooked house. If you like "golden age" Stephen King and Twilight Zone, or modern Lovecraftian cosmic horror, you'll be absorbed by David Erik Nelson's There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House. Read it instantly for free with Kindle Unlimited. Praise for There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House: "absorbing horror novella" (Recommended Story)--Rich Horton, Locus, Sept 2017 "This is a very entertaining and readable story, and what makes it even better is the sheer amount of incidental detail that Nelson includes. At the end, just when I thought it was coming off the boil a little, there is a neat little twist that pulls it back up again, as well as allowing for sequels. One for the 'Best of the Year' collections."--Paul Fraser, writing for sfmagazines.com "Downtrodden architect Glenn Washington and his none-too-bright sidekick Lennie help a crooked real estate baron flip houses in downtrodden Detroit. A house comes up that is too good to gut for parts. Too good to be true. Waaaay too good. Thing is, nothing leads where it should -- go through the front door, step out the door on the back porch. Best library ever. And why are the cops nosing around? Non-Euclidian architectural petty-crime adventure, and all that implies."--Adrian Simmons, writing for Black Gate magazine.