Goodhouse
Peyton Marshall
Doubleday
If this is the future, I am opting out. Then again, by the time this scenario comes around, towards the end of this century, my body will have opted out for me...
Perfectly illustrating the word dystopia, Goodhouse is an institute in an imaginary world, where, for many, things are as bad as they can get.
James Goodhouse, (in this institution they all have the same surname, saves confusion...) is our central character and narrator. Despite being a fairly decent young man, this 17-year-old seems to be almost obligated to, dangerously, put his foot in it, much to his detriment. Already traumatised by a past where, in a former, more relaxed, institute, he watched as his fellow inmates died, (trapped inside a burning building), James is trying to, safely, mark time. One day he will make a life for himself on the outside.
This is a world where boys with a “genetic profile”, inclined towards “bad impulses”, (those with the wrong “biometric markers”) are caught early (under the age of six) and removed from their families. They will be “remade from the inside out”, moulded to fit in. Goodhouse, is a futuristic long-term detention centre, where boys must always question their motives and report each others’ misdemeanours.
Sent to spend a day with a family, on his first day pass into the outside, James takes a tiny hair slide, from a girl’s bedroom – and is caught.
The punishment activates a plethora of negative consequences, affecting James’s life and those of various others in his vicinity.
Into his life comes Bethany, it is her slide he stole.
Institutionalised for most of his life, the question is whether James can hack it on the outside. But is outside better than in?
A compelling thriller, which ends on a note where a sequel seems in the offing. Interestingly, the author acknowledges ideas from the memoirs of inmates of the Preston Youth Correctional Facility, which, until it closed in 2011, had been in operation, in California for 117 years.