Steph Cha’s YOUR HOUSE WILL PAY Unwinds the Carceral Plot

A narrative for abolitionists

Pop culture narratives are woven out of, and weave together, carceral logic. Action movies, superhero movies, horror films, cop shows, detective shows, legal dramas—our most popular genres follow mimic and reproduce the justice of cops, prison and revenge. Some bad person does a violent, bad thing. The hero brings them to justice by inflicting violence upon them, through beatdowns, gunshots, or extended incarceration. Flip the channel, watch the same show.

These stories of an eye for an eye and justice systems vindicated are so ubiquitous that it can be hard to imagine how you might tell a different story. What would a crime drama even be if the cops aren’t the good guys? How do you tell a story of wrongdoing that isn’t righted through violent escalation and escalating violence?

Steph Cha’s 2019 novel Your House Will Pay tries to answer those questions. It succeeds mostly through a single narrative trick, which is especially brilliant because, by the end, you realize it isn’t a trick at all.

(Quite a few spoilers follow, if you’re worried about that sort of thing.)

The book (based on a real incident) is centered on the shooting death in Los Angeles of a 16-year-old Black girl named Ava Matthews. In 1991, a female Korean store owner accuses Matthews of trying to shoplift milk, and then shoots her in the back of the head. The store owner, Yvonne Park, escapes with a manslaughter charge and a slap on the wrist. A quarter century later, in 2019, she is shot in front of her store.

The novel is mostly told from the perspective of two witnesses to violence: Shawn, Ava’s brother, who saw her gunned down, and Grace, the store owner’s daughter, who is with her mother when she is shot.

YOUR HOUSE WILL PAY is in part a traditional whodunit, though most of the twists are pretty easy to spot. What’s interesting, and innovative, though, is the way that the novel uses leaps in time to frame its characters. Cha is careful to introduce you to each of the participants in the story before they commit any acts of violence or criminality.

You see Ava’s humor and her gentle, teasing affection for her brother before you learn that yes, she occasionally shoplifts. You see Yvonne’s devotion to her daughters and the pain of her estrangement from Grace’s sister before you learn that she murdered a girl. You see Shawn’s nephew Darryl trying to scrabble nervously into manhood before you find out about the worst thing he’s done. You see Grace’s exasperation with her sister and her moments of passionate condemnation of injustice before a video of her spewing a racist rant goes viral on social media.

Many of the character in the novel do bad, horrible, even unforgivable things. But they do those things after you get to know them in their better moments—as family, as friends, as people who love, who feel guilt, who try, intermittently, to do right.

In crime novels (and other genre narratives), you generally meet the bad person after they’ve done, or as they’re doing, the bad thing. The point of view is with the victims, and you root for them to get revenge and/or justice. The cops, or superhero vigilantes, in that scenario are with the good guys. They track down evidence, find the bad guys, and ensure that wrongs are righted.

But in Cha’s novel, everyone is a person before they get to the bad things they’ve done. That means you want everyone to be all right—the brother robbed of his sister, the daughter robbed of her mother, the kid who shoplifts and the kid who does worse than that.

The cops, from this perspective, aren’t anyone’s friend. They’re out to inflict more trauma by throwing people in prison and separating them from their families and loved ones. They don’t care about the people we’ve learned to care about. They don’t even really care about justice. They just want to arrest someone so they can tell the press and the public that the police are worthy of all those cop show narratives, and of their salaries.

Again, this is a narrative trick; Cha has to jump around in time and withhold certain information from the reader and from her characters in order to make sure that you meet every single person in the book at their best before you meet them at your worst. From the perspective of most genre narratives, this feels like cheating.

But is it cheating? Most people, after all, don’t start committing violent acts the instant they’re born. Most people care about others and have others who care about them. They are children, siblings, parents, friends, before they are perpetrators. Cha simply takes care to show that truth. It’s genre narratives, which show evil doers as evil doers first and everything else afterwards, that are messing with chronology to direct your empathy to “heroes” and away from “villains.”

Cha isn’t arguing that morality is relative or that there are no bad people or bad actions. On the contrary, the book shows the painful effects of murder much more starkly than most pulp, not least by showing how racism and violence are intertwined. But Your House Will Pay doesn’t believe that the police fix harms, or that retribution provides much in the way of comfort or closure, especially when administered by an indifferent and racist police force. “What good would it do, for the mob to unleash its outrage on them?” the novel asks in its last pages. The unleashing of outrage is a policy choice, but it’s also a genre pleasure. Cha suggests that to question the first, we need to rethink the second.