knack for surprise and ambush would be the envy of any airport thriller writer, yet here it's entirely divorced from plot. Surprise is managed in a way that I don't know how to explain or what exactly to compare it to—it's just genuinely unexpected. The House of Hunger shocked me, not because it brought me the news about some bit of brutality or another—literature from every continent and era has made that more or less routine—but because I was shocked by the words on the page, the book in my hands. Marechera seemed to be coming at me with everything, yet with an enormous artistry. His life seemed to be at stake in his words and, while I was reading, so did mine." Michelle Decker has written, "Marechera's satire [in The House of Hunger] relies on a formal and stylistic mode heavily imbued with the very chaos and grotesquery that his texts criticize, ... deliberately alienating the reader at every level of content and form. Content: sordid representations of sexuality, domestic abuse, drunkenness, and profanity; form: a disjointed, chaotic narrative from the perspective of mostly unlikeable characters. Marechera's writing feels less like satire than the experience of being forced to relive someone else's nightmare—the characters' demons have somehow become yours, but you may never be able to decipher why you (or they) are being so tormented. Whether this aesthetic was a self-indulgent, European import or a revolutionary, antinationalist African innovation depended on whom you asked." Film A Channel Four film adaptation of the book as a drama-documentary, with which Marechera was initially involved, and for which he returned to Zimbabwe in 1982 ostensibly for five weeks, soon ran into trouble when the author fell out with the producer. Marechera withdrew from the film, and he never again left the country, dying there five years later. Selected editions 1978: Heinemann African Writers Series (No. 207), 1st edition; 2009: Heinemann, 2nd edition, . 1978: Pantheon, US hardback edition, . References Further reading Helon Habila, "On Dambudzo Marechera: The Life and Times of an African Writer", VQR, Winter 2006. Brendon Nicholls, "Postcolonial Narcissism, Cryptopolitics, and Hypnocritique: Dambudzo Marechera's The House of Hunger", Postcolonial Text, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2013). Elliot Ziwira, "Waiting for the Rain in the House of Hunger", The Herald (Zimbabwe), 17 March 2014. 1978 short story collections African Writers Series Debut books Fiction with unreliable narrators Metafictional novels Zimbabwean literature