The Gray House is a Russian postmodern/magical realist novel, written by Mariam Petrosyan in the Russian Nineties. It was published in Russian in 2009, and translated to English in 2017.
The novel is set in a specialized boarding school for children and teenagers with disabilities. The time and place are deliberately obscured: one can deduce that it takes place somewhere in the late 80s-early 90s in a Fictional Country which looks like a mish-mash of post-Soviet Russia, Western Europe, and United States. It starts as a more-or-less realistic drama story about Smoker, a paraplegic teenage tenant of the House who struggles to adapt in a new group of students. Initially, he feels like he is the Only Sane Man: his groupmates are obsessed with seemingly childish traditions and "rituals" of the House, they invent strange fairytales and indulge in bizarre fantasies. However, it turns out that these "fantasies" are not fantasies at all, that the House contains many mystical (and often dark) secrets, and each of the students has their own skeleton in the closet. Things only get weirder from there...
This novel provides examples of:
- Artificial Limbs: Grasshopper/Sphinx, who was born without arms, gains a pair of those.
- Enchanted Forest: The Forest is a mysterious parallel world that some of the House's inhabitants can visit. It has mysterious creatures like dogheads and whistlers, giant blackcap mushrooms and bloodsucking flowers, and a lot of other weird things.
- False Protagonist: Smoker: the first Book is told almost entirely from his perspective, but in Books 2 and 3 he gives way to other narrators.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: All the inhabitants of the House; however, Smoker's real name is revealed at one point (it is Eric Zimmerman).
- Really 700 Years Old: As it turns out at the end, Tabaqui is living in an eternal time loop from childhood to late adolescence, so while he always looks like a kid or a teen, he's actually very old.
- Show Within a Show: The inhabitants of the House publish their own magazine, called Blume, with Tabaqui as chief editor.
- The Trickster: Tabaqui the Jackal.
- Weredragon: Alexander turns out to be one.
- World of Mysteries: A number of the House's tenants are able to visit the Underside of the House, a parallel world which is literally the World of Mysteries: a surreal, Kafkaesque realm host to all sorts of fairytale/Magical Realist and detective/thriller plots, with multiple references to the pop culture of the 1990s. Because of their superstitions students usually do not discuss in detail what happened to them in the Underside, only giving some subtle hints, which makes it even more mysterious.
