Narrating a life or a dream exposes certain cracks in the one who remembers them, and it is possible and desirable to recapture them. This novel by José Luís Peixoto responds to the intimate need to narrate the world as a journey that can be presented with the materials of paradise or the terrible spasms of hell. If literature is the geography of the world through language, then José Luís Peixoto has managed to establish a prophetic communication with its forms. Here, the reader will find open symbols, oracular characters, and a narrative style that sits at the crossroads between lament and renewal. A House in the Dark follows someone who could be any of us, faced with an inexplicable universe that only finds meaning through our connections with others, the distances that separate us, and the language that inevitably makes our worlds possible. Peixoto has written a novel that, for lack of a better title, absorbs the Christian tradition of Purgatory and the shared pains that make us human.