Reviews
“A rollicking, big-hearted family saga that reads like an urgent dispatch from that friend of yours who is manic and funny, has a great eye for the telling detail, and is vitally interested in the way the world works—especially how we move (or don’t) toward greater compassion and understanding of other people.”
— George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo
“Wonderful and zany. Stahl, a poet and former restaurateur, writes with such wit and brio and energy. From first page to last, Dear Future Occupants is a pungent delight.”
— Margot Livesey, author of The Road from Belhaven
“Stahl brings the family and its trials to life in brilliant chapters that are tragicomic, made entirely believable and poignant by the author’s marvelous ability to write excellent scenes. In this ‘colonial gothic’ novel, Stahl gives us a portrayal of a place and time that’s important not only to this family but to American culture in general.”
— Brian Bouldrey, author of The Good Pornographer
“Suburban Connecticut in the 1970s was no country for oddballs; in his efforts to fit in there, Bud Sommer and his family succeed mostly in laying waste to its rock-ribbed norms. A hilarious, poignant battle between love and conformity, and a brilliant, mature, big-hearted debut by Keith Stahl.”
— Jonathan Dee, author of Sugar Street
“A rollicking, full-hearted, and very funny novel about an eccentric, messy American family. Stahl is a bright, energetic new voice in fiction; you can feel his joy on every page.”
— Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward
“Expect ’70s queer icons, stoned Wiffle Ball utopias, confusing erections, and gorgeous musings on art and food service. Only a writer as talented as Stahl can write a story as real and surreal, dark and hopeful, poignant and hilarious as Dear Future Occupants.”
— Myriam Lacroix, author of How It Works Out
Description
Dear Future Occupants is a wild and weird ride, poignantly exploring themes of family, sexuality, and addiction. This colonial gothic novel opens in 1979, when patriarch Bud, with dubious restaurant experience, uses his wife’s inheritance to purchase a diner in hopes of proving himself. When he relocates his family to his conservative fictional hometown of Greenhill, Connecticut, things begin to fall apart after the discovery of an all-too-literal skeleton in their basement. A series of misfortunes, accidents, and comedic events follow, including the creation of a vending-machine-sandwich/drug-dealing business and a protest-turned-siege at the local hospital.
Charting one family’s rise to subversive glory in a genteel New England town, the novel is told through found documents and multiple perspectives, including those of Bud; Victor, the middle son; and Herman, the ahead-of-their time, nonbinary, eldest child whose journal entries serve as a kind of Greek chorus throughout. In this breathless, exuberant work, Keith Stahl brilliantly captures the foundational dichotomies at the heart of the American experience: a puritanical distrust of anything fun and a nearly anarchic love of pleasure and freedom. Moving and bitterly humorous, Dear Future Occupants is a paean to the working class and the diversity that holds a family together.