Threnody Unthreaded: Iraq and its Aftermath in Richard House’s The Kills

The Kills (2013), Richard House’s epic novel in four parts, is a sprawling digital text whose conspiracy-thriller plot centres on the reconstruction of Iraq. The Kills is, I argue, a kind of threnody: a complex work of mourning that counters what Judith Butler calls the “frames of war,” which have delimited the Western perspective on Iraq and marked certain deaths as “ungrievable.” House’s novel not only provides a counter-narrative but teaches a strategy for counter-reading. The Kills is a fragmented text that prompts readers to attempt to reassemble its pieces, a strategy that is enacted by its multimodal form, manipulation of genre conventions, and multiple plot threads that lack narrative closure. The trailing threads of this unthreaded threnody are a provocation to continue the work of mourning, not by forgetting but by remaining indignant, inquisitive, and engaged in an ethical reading of the transnational world, a task which demands resilient scepticism and assimilative agility.