Dear Future Occupants is a wild and weird ride, poignantly exploring themes of family, sexuality, and addiction. This colonial gothic novel opens in 1979, when patriarch Bud, with dubious restaurant experience, uses his wife’s inheritance to purchase a diner in hopes of proving himself. When he relocates his family to his conservative fictional hometown of Greenhill, Connecticut, things begin to fall apart after the discovery of an all-too-literal skeleton in their basement. A series of misfortunes, accidents, and comedic events follow, including the creation of a vending-machine-sandwich/drug-dealing business and a protest-turned-siege at the local hospital.
Charting one family’s rise to subversive glory in a genteel New England town, the novel is told through found documents and multiple perspectives, including those of Bud; Victor, the middle son; and Herman, the ahead-of-their time, nonbinary, eldest child whose journal entries serve as a kind of Greek chorus throughout. In this breathless, exuberant work, Keith Stahl brilliantly captures the foundational dichotomies at the heart of the American experience: a puritanical distrust of anything fun and a nearly anarchic love of pleasure and freedom. Moving and bitterly humorous, Dear Future Occupants is a paean to the working class and the diversity that holds a family together.