Small Game — John Blades

"It was the neighborhood spook house, vacant and neglected for almost a year. We got it at a closeout price. But it was no bargain."
Scott and Kathy Ryan don't have much choice. A third child has made their small city apartment burst its seams, and Scott's market-research job pays barely enough to cover the earnest money on this old ruin of a house in an about-to-be gentrified neighborhood. Moving in, they set to work with an energy born of desperation.
But it isn't long before Scott grows uneasy. The renovation seems to be taking forever, and his neighbors are acting decidedly odd. Meanwhile, at Scott's job, office colleagues are disappearing at an alarming rate as the recently merged conglomerate moves to consolidate with ruthless abandon. No one is safe.
Newly spackled walls that fissure, freshly applied paint that blisters; household objects gone missing, then mysteriously reappearing in slightly altered condition at a neighbor's periodic yard sales; vigilante patrols poking into private places at all hours of the night; and a band of squirrels, oversexed and malignant, aggressively staking claim to more and more of the house: Scott Ryan finds himself battling a buckling, crumbling universe with only his paintbrushes and augers as weapons. Until he buys the gun.
Interleaving each only marginally askew detail amid the quotidian and the familiar, Small Game moves in deft, quick steps from the comfortable and the customary to the offbeat and the downright bizarre until the reader is forced to ask if Scott is the victim of society's pressure to toe the line - or the victim of an overactive imagination.
A mordantly funny tale of manners and mores in contemporary middle America, Small Game jolts us with the shock of recognition even as it releases us through the tonic of laughter.