A Vegas Ghost Story: A Brian Rouff Book Review
Part cross-country road trip. Part coming-of-age romance.
Part haunted mystery. All Vegas.
Brian Rouff’s The
House Always Wins is a genre-bending novel based around fictional character
Anna Christiansen and her life as a reporter in small town, Michigan. When she
gets the opportunity to cover a retro alt country blues band at her local venue,
her night goes from bad to worse in a matter of hours.
Just when she thought her night couldn’t possibly go more
wrong, one of the band members actually agrees to her interview. Not even 12
hours later, she agrees to move back to Las Vegas with him.
As Anna and her now-boyfriend Aaron Eisenberg move into
their fixer-upper home on the outskirts of town, they find themselves getting
mixed in with city corruption and a haunted house. Will she get to keep her
house? Or did her bad luck follow her to Vegas?
Rouff’s fascinating take on multiple genres is partially
based on a house his family lived in for three years as they remodeled it. The
home was previously owned by Jack Eglash, the band leader for the old Sahara
Hotel. The house was vacant for many years before Rouff’s family began
restoring it.
“While we worked on it, I felt like we were bringing back a
ghost, not an evil entity but more of a trickster that messed with temperature,
clocks, drawers and doors, etc.,” Rouff said. “As a novelist, that’s all I
needed to move forward on an idea of a house haunted by the ghost of a dead
Vegas mobster (more interesting than an orchestra leader) based loosely on
legendary Vegas racketeer Moe Dalitz, who reinvented himself as a scion of the
community after a nefarious past as a bootlegger in the Midwest during
Prohibition. That was the impetus for the story.”
Although his family moved out and it was destroyed in a fire
many years later, the novel slowly transformed into a tribute for his old family
home.
The flowing story arc and accurate representations of Las
Vegas are just some of the impressive pieces of this story. It takes quite a
few unexpected yet serious turns, all while stepping outside of the normal
formula for a novel.
“It forced me to stretch my skills and up my game. Much more
challenging to market, but more satisfying to write,” Rouff said.
Part adventure. Part passion. Part spooky. All victory.
0 comments