The Handyman Method
The further I get from teaching, the less I want to ever do that again; and then along comes a book like Nick Cutter and Andrew F. Sullivan’s The Handyman Method that has so much to say that I wish I could build a whole course around it. A veritable canon has been written about Gothic feminism, and rightly so, but this book opens the door to the dank basement of Gothic masculinity, forcing us to examine the dark shape of manhood in the current moment.
The immediate premise of the novel will feel familiar: a family moves into a new home, a few troubling things happened to them in the recent past, and boy howdy are some even more troubling things about to happen to them inside their house. Beyond that, though, The Handyman Method breaks ground with novel terrors. The new house needs work, as all houses do, but it’s the kind of work that requires masculine expertise—knowledge and skills that the white-collar protagonist simply never needed as part of his white-collar aspirations. Trent keenly feels the absence of manly expertise, the kind that’s supposed to be passed down from hard-working father to hard-working son. And so, Trent turns to the great modern equalizer to fill the abyss of masculinity: Handyman Hank, a genial, brotherly Youtuber whose channel focuses on home repair and the lost art of male competency.
Of course, when Handyman Hank begins engaging with Trent about all the other masculine deficiencies of the current generation—what we have, what we lack, where we fall short of our forefathers, what we feel has been taken away from us—the whole tangled mess of what it means to be a man tumbles into view with disturbing consequences for Trent, his wife Rita, and their son Milo. There’s more to it, particularly where Rita and Milo are concerned, but I wouldn’t dare spoil that for you. I’d say this is a book that anyone can enjoy, but if you’re like me—someone who likes to be able to fix his own shit, who thinks that contractors are absolutely out to rip you off—you’re going to see yourself reflected in the main character. It won’t be pretty, but we need to look now more than ever at the contradictory expectations laid on us from every direction and consider the horror of how vulnerable that really makes us.
For those familiar with Sullivan’s The Marigold or any of Cutter’s previous work, you may be surprised that The Handyman Method hits a more “mainstream horror” note. It’s perhaps slightly lighter than you’d expect from this pairing, though there is one extended scene of brutality that is awesomely fucking gross, but this is the kind of novel you could comfortably give someone who only fucks around with stuff on the level of, say, Stephen King. I think they’d both enjoy it immensely and maybe even get rattled out of their rut by it. We deserve mainstream horror this good.