'In the freezing Antarctic waters south of Tasmania, a mountain was discovered in 1642 by the seafaring explorer Gerrit Jansz. Not just any mountain but one that Jansz estimated was an unbelievable height of twenty-five thousand meters.
'In 2016, at the foot of the unearthly mountain, a controversial and ambitious 'dream home', the Observatory, is painstakingly constructed by an eccentric billionaire - the only man to have ever reached the summit.
'Rita Gausse, estranged daughter of the architect who designed the Observatory is surprised, upon her father's death, to be invited to the isolated mansion to meet the famously reclusive owner, Walter Richman. But from the beginning, something doesn't feel right. Why is Richman so insistent that she come? What does he expect of her?
'When cataclysmic circumstances intervene to trap Rita and a handful of other guests in the Observatory, cut off from the outside world, she slowly being to learn the unsettling - and ultimately horrifying - answers.'
Source: Back cover.
'Receiving an Aurealis Award for best horror novel in 2019, The Rich Man’s House tells the story of events that unfold within and around the mansion commissioned by Walter Richman on a mythical mountain in the Southern Ocean near Tasmania, Australia. The external atmosphere around Richman’s house consists of elemental forces or “presences” that become increasingly sinister. These external elements and the architectural atmosphere of the house create disturbing uncertainties about how to interpret the events of the novel. Collapsing traditional notions of background and foreground, McGahan’s novel is susceptible to “an atmospheric reading” (Chandler, 199) that includes but exceeds the fogs, clouds, mists and winds that are its partial constituents.' (Publication abstract)
'Andrew McGahan's final novel, The Rich Man's House (2019), collates many of the preoccupations of his literary career: power, the environment, and the precarious foundations of colonisation in Australia. This paper posits that the novel's commentary on human overreach is an alternative history that encapsulates the Anthropocene and explores the problematic, gendered dimensions of conquest and its representation. Situated within a broad and growing literary scholarship that explores the innovative application of ecological frameworks, the paper interrogates the novel's critique of intersecting erasures of coloniality, masculinist domination and historical certitude. It suggests that the disaster visited upon the characters of The Rich Man's House is a demonstration of a specific phenomenon: ecologist Barry Commoner's fourth rule of ecology - nature always bats last. This paper also contributes to scholarship on McGahan's oeuvre, noting that his final work is prescient in its awareness of increasing climate disaster.' (Publication abstract)
'Placing McGahan’s last novel in the context of his interest in the opposition between nature and man-made constructions explored in some of his earlier works, the paper explores the epic scale of this conflict as it plays out in his last novel, The Rich Man’s House. Namely, various conventions of the epic genre are adopted and adapted to suggest the historical, global and national importance of the battle between the self-aggrandising mankind and nature on the brink of survival.' (Publication abstract)
'Andrew McGahan’s first novel was not, in fact, Praise, that best-selling classic of Australian dirty realism. According to a Sydney Morning Herald interview from 2011, his first book-length fiction was actually a thriller in the style of Stephen King that was never published.' (Introduction)
;So many and varied are the reasons to find The Rich Man’s House — Australian author Andrew McGahan’s final, posthumously published novel — problematic that, initially at least, it’s hard to understand why the book succeeds so mightily. Thin characterisation, workmanlike dialogue and a surpassingly strange premise are just a few of the flaws that glare back at those trained to a more orderly reading experience.' (Introduction)
'Andrew McGahan’s first novel Praise (1992) was one of those books that captured the mood of its time and place. More than any other Australian novel of the early 1990s, it found a way to express the peculiar sense of disaffection and uncertainty inherited by those of us who just happened to come of age at the tail end of two decades of social and economic transformation, at the very moment an exhausted nation slumped into a recession. Its depiction of the seedy urban existence of its narrator Gordon Buchanan was greeted with a fusillade of clichéd adjectives (gritty, unflinching, confronting, and so forth) and hailed as a contribution to a confected genre that an especially witless hack decided to call ‘grunge’ — a literary movement notable for the fact that no one wanted to belong to it, least of all McGahan. But the significant aspect of all the sex and drinking and drug-taking described in the pages of Praise was that they were so ordinary. There was nothing edgy or rebellious or liberating or hedonistic about them; they were simply part of the texture of reality, commonplace activities that lacked even the residual glamour of decadence. They evoked a drab world of foreclosed possibilities, a world in which both the tattered countercultural ethos of the 1960s and the fluorescent crapulence of the 1980s had been exposed as empty promises. The passive cycle of drinking and drugging was presented as a numbing routine, a mundane way to pass the time while surveying a prospectless horizon. Sex was depicted with an emphasis on its unerotic complications: premature ejaculation, venereal disease, unwanted pregnancy, mismatched desires, a general sense of awkwardness and embarrassment.' (Introduction)
(Introduction)
'Andrew McGahan’s final book, The Rich Man’s House, opens with an apology. ‘It’s a finished novel – I wouldn’t be letting it out into the world if it wasn’t – but I can’t deny that my abrupt decline in health has forced the publishers and I to hurry the rewriting and editing process extremely, and that this is not quite the book it would have been had cancer not intervened … for once I can fairly plead – I was really going to fix that!’' (Introduction)
'Placing McGahan’s last novel in the context of his interest in the opposition between nature and man-made constructions explored in some of his earlier works, the paper explores the epic scale of this conflict as it plays out in his last novel, The Rich Man’s House. Namely, various conventions of the epic genre are adopted and adapted to suggest the historical, global and national importance of the battle between the self-aggrandising mankind and nature on the brink of survival.' (Publication abstract)
'Andrew McGahan's final novel, The Rich Man's House (2019), collates many of the preoccupations of his literary career: power, the environment, and the precarious foundations of colonisation in Australia. This paper posits that the novel's commentary on human overreach is an alternative history that encapsulates the Anthropocene and explores the problematic, gendered dimensions of conquest and its representation. Situated within a broad and growing literary scholarship that explores the innovative application of ecological frameworks, the paper interrogates the novel's critique of intersecting erasures of coloniality, masculinist domination and historical certitude. It suggests that the disaster visited upon the characters of The Rich Man's House is a demonstration of a specific phenomenon: ecologist Barry Commoner's fourth rule of ecology - nature always bats last. This paper also contributes to scholarship on McGahan's oeuvre, noting that his final work is prescient in its awareness of increasing climate disaster.' (Publication abstract)
'Receiving an Aurealis Award for best horror novel in 2019, The Rich Man’s House tells the story of events that unfold within and around the mansion commissioned by Walter Richman on a mythical mountain in the Southern Ocean near Tasmania, Australia. The external atmosphere around Richman’s house consists of elemental forces or “presences” that become increasingly sinister. These external elements and the architectural atmosphere of the house create disturbing uncertainties about how to interpret the events of the novel. Collapsing traditional notions of background and foreground, McGahan’s novel is susceptible to “an atmospheric reading” (Chandler, 199) that includes but exceeds the fogs, clouds, mists and winds that are its partial constituents.' (Publication abstract)
