Daniel is a real estate agent leading a couple through a cabin when the husband suggests, “It’s like a Frank house.” From there, everything changes in Daniel’s life. When Daniel was a child, his family had purchased land in Randall, AZ from a man named Frank Watkins, and they’d hired Frank to assemble the prefabricated A-frame they’d be using as a vacation home. He knew, first-hand, what it meant to live in a Frank House, but he’d still only glimpsed a fragment of what that meant.
As the memories of his surreal childhood experiences with Frank come rushing back to him, along with the tragedies that followed, Daniel finds himself driven by a compulsion to find the strange and sinister man who ruined his life. As he’ll soon discover, Daniel’s was not the only life ruined by living in a Frank House, and it’s more than shoddy workmanship and incompetence involved. It seems like there might be some cruel design behind it all.
The reader is treated to unsettling glimpses into the world Frank is crafting with his seemingly alien compulsions, whetting the appetite and setting the mind awhirl as we approach the dizzying and horrific conclusion in the missing town of Plutarch, TX.
A ghost story with a hint of cosmic horror resides at the center of the mystery Bentley Little lays out for us with The Handyman. There’s a hint of Danielewski’s House of Leaves in these pages and a little bit of the Winchester Mystery House thrown in for flavor, but it’s distinctly Little in craftsmanship.
The narration provided by Chris Andrew Ciulla is fantastic, especially on those rare occasions when we get to hear Frank brought to life with his peculiar speech pattern and unusual cadence.