The Sofa

Kafkaesque slow-burn domestic horror from a master of the uncanny.

Mr. Montessori and his family return home from a trip to the beach to discover that their sofa is different. Once dark and contemporary, it’s now antique, green and yellow, and smelling faintly of damp.

Its appearance and origins are a mystery. A joke? An inverted theft? A break in the fabric of reality? Yes, the police take the “crime” seriously. But what happens next lies outside their expertise. Strange sounds in the night. A half-bathroom toilet with a mind of its own. Odd, fleeting glimpses of something (or someone) in mirrors. The inexplicable vision of Montessori’s neighbor: He swears he saw a burglar. . . .

Montessori’s quest for answers will take him to a dank highway overpass in decayed upstate New York, a very strange dry-cleaning supply concern in outermost Queens, and into the depths of an eerie, warped forest where time and space no longer connect, all while putting his ever-more-troubled marriage and young family in grave danger. But that’s what it costs to find out if we own our possessions ― or if they own us.

Munson emerges as a master stylist in this tense, taut work of surreal humor and psychological horror.

Sam Munson is the author of Dog Symphony (New Directions), The War Against the Assholes (Saga), and The November Criminals (Doubleday). His fiction has appeared in The Baffler, Granta, Guernica, McSweeney’s, n+1, Tablet, and elsewhere. He is the co-founder of The New York Review of Dreams (www.rateyourdream.com).