In the following essay, Markos describes the novel as a chronicle "of paradise lost through innocence " as it describes the values and moral failures of figures from the American past.

One begins reading The Dead of the House with the curiously refreshing sense that this is not going to be a fashionably "absurd" contemporary novel. The manner is realistic. Instead of caricature and fantasy, we are introduced to characters of full dimensions with roots lying deep in a recognizable version of American history. Hannah Green, through her narrator, writes lovingly of an American family, of ancestors who throve on this continent, beginning with the first Nye who came to the New World as a minister called by God and the first DeGoIyer who came as a deserter from the French army. The record of this first DeGoIyer's adventures on the new continent, including his service in the...