I want to talk here about two stories dealing with the archetype of the Bad Place, one good, one great. As it happens, both deal with haunted houses. Fair enough, I think; haunted cars and railway stations are nasty, but your house is the place where you're supposed to be able to unbutton your armor and put your shield away. Our homes are the places where we allow ourselves the ultimate vulnerability: they are the places where we take off our clothes and go to sleep with no guard on watch (except perhaps for those ever more popular drones of modern society, the smoke-detector and the burglar alarm). Robert Frost said home is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in. The old aphorisms say that home is where the heart is, there's no place like home, that a heap of lovin' can make a house a home. We are abjured to keep the home fires burning, and when fighter pilots finish their missions they radio that they are "coming home." And even if you are a stranger in a strange land, you can usually find a restaurant that will temporarily assuage your homesickness as well as your hunger with a big plate of home-cooked home fries.
It doesn't hurt to emphasize again that horror fiction is a cold touch in the midst of the familiar, and good horror fiction applies this cold touch with sudden, unexpected pressure. When we go home and shoot the bolt on the door, we like to think we're locking trouble out. The good horror story about the Bad Place whispers that we are not locking the world out; we are locking ourselves in . . . with them.
Both of these tales adhere quite stringently to the conventional haunted-house formula; we are allowed to see a chain of hauntings, working together to reinforce the concept of the house as a Bad Place. One might even say that the truest definition of the haunted house would be "a house with an unsavory history." The author must do more than simply bring on a repertory company of ghosts, complete with clanking chains, doors that bang open or shut in the middle of the night, and strange noises in the attic or the cellar (the attic's especially good for a bit of low, throbbing terror--when was the last time you explored yours with a candle during a power failure while a strong autumn wind blew outside?); the haunted-house tale demands a historical context.
Both The House Next Door, by Anne Rivers Siddons (1978), and The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (1959), provide this historical context. Jackson establishes it immediately in the first paragraph of her novel, stating her tale's argument in lovely, dreamlike prose:
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
I think there are few if any descriptive passages in the English language that are any finer than this; it is the sort of quiet epiphany every writer hopes for: words that somehow transcend words, words which add up to a total greater than the sum of the parts. Analysis of such a paragraph is a mean and shoddy trick, and should almost always be left to college and university professors, those lepidopterists of literature who, when they see a lovely butterfly, feel that they should immediately run into the field with a net, catch it, kill it with a drop of chloroform, and mount it on a white board and put it in a glass case, where it will still be beautiful . . . and just as dead as horseshit.
Having said that, let us analyze this paragraph a bit. I promise not to kill it or mount it, however; I have neither the skill nor the inclination (but show me any graduate thesis in the field of English/American lit, and I will show you a mess of dead butterflies, most of them killed messily and mounted inexpertly). We'll just stun it for a moment or two and then let it fly on.
All I really want to do is point out how many things this single paragraph does. It begins by suggesting that Hill House is a living organism; tells us that this live organism does not exist under conditions of absolute reality; that because (although here I should add that I may be making an induction Mrs. Jackson did not intend) it does not dream, it is not sane. The paragraph tells us how long its history has been, immediately establishing that historical context that is so important to the haunted-house story, and it concludes by telling us that something walks in the rooms and halls of Hill House. All of this in two sentences.
Jackson introduces an even more unsettling idea by implication. She suggests that Hill House looks all right on the surface. It is not the creepy old Marsten place from 'Salem's Lot with its boarded-up windows, mangy roof, and peeling walls. It's not the tumble-down brooding place at the ends of all those dead-end streets, those places where children throw rocks by daylight and fear to venture after dark. Hill House is looking pretty good. But then, Norman Bates was looking pretty good, too, at least on the surface. There are no drafts in Hill House, but it (and those foolish enough to go there, we presume) does not exist under conditions of absolute reality; therefore, it does not dream; therefore, it is not sane. And, apparently, it kills.
If Shirley Jackson presents us with a history--a sort of supernatural provenance--as a starting point, then Anne Rivers Siddons gives us the provenance itself.
The House Next Door is a novel only in terms of its first-person narrator, Colquitt Kennedy, who lives with her husband, Walter, next to the haunted house. We see their lives and their way of thinking change as a result of their proximity to the house, and the novel establishes itself, finally, when Colquitt and Walter feel impelled to "step into the story." This happens quite satisfyingly in the book's closing fifty pages, but during much of the book Colquitt and Walter are very much sideline characters. The book is compartmentalized into three longish sections, and each is really a story in itself. We are given the story of the Harralsons, the Sheehans, and the Greenes, and we see the house next door mainly through their experiences. In other words, while The Haunting of Hill House provides us with a supernatural provenance--the bride whose carriage overturned, killing her seconds before she was to get her first glimpse of Hill House, for example--merely as background stuff, The House Next Door could have been subtitled "The Making of a Haunted House."
This approach works well for Ms. Siddons, who does not write prose with the beautiful simplicity of Mrs. Jackson, but who nevertheless acquits herself well and honorably here. The book is well planned and brilliantly cast ("People like us don't appear in People magazine," the first sentence of the book reads, and Colquitt goes on to tell us just how she and her husband, two private people, ended up not only in People magazine, but ostracized by their neighbors, hated by city realtors, and ready to burn the house next door to the ground). This is no gothic manse covered with drifting tatters of fog off the moor; there are no battlements, no moats, not even a widow's walk. . . . Whoever heard of such things in suburban Atlanta, anyway? When the story opens, the haunted house hasn't even been built.
Colquitt and Walter live in a rich and comfortable section of suburban Atlanta. The machinery of social intercourse in this suburb--a suburb of a New South city where many of the Old South virtues still hold, Colquitt tells us--is smoothly running and almost silent, well oiled with u.m.c. money. Next to their home is a wooded lot which has never been developed because of the difficult topography. Enter Kim Dougherty, young hotshot architect; he builds a contemporary home on the lot that fits the land like a glove. In fact . . . it looks almost alive. Colquitt writes of her first look at the house plans:
I drew my breath at it. It was magnificent. I do not as a rule care for contemporary architecture, [but] . . . This house was different. It commanded you, somehow, yet soothed you. It grew out of the penciled earth like an elemental spirit that had lain, locked and yearning for the light, through endless deeps of time, waiting to be released. . . . I could hardly imagine the hands and machinery that would form it. I thought of something that had started with a seed, put down deep roots, grown
in the sun and rains of many years into the upper air. In the sketches, at least, the woods pressed untouched around it like companions. The creek enfolded its mass and seemed to nourish its roots. It looked--inevitable.
Events follow in ordained fashion. Dionysian change is coming to this Apollonian suburb where hitherto there has been a place for everything and everything is in its place. That night, when Colquitt hears an owl hooting in the woodlot where Dougherty's house will soon go up, she finds herself tying a knot in the corner of her bedsheet to ward off bad luck, as her grandmother did.
Dougherty is building the house for a young couple, the Harralsons (but he would have been just as happy building it for Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, he tells the Kennedys over drinks; it's the house that interests him, not the owners). Buddy Harralson is an up-and-coming young lawyer. His little-girl-Chi-Omega-Junior-Leaguer wife, hideo-comically known as Pie (as in Punkin Pie, her daddy's nickname), loses first her baby to the house in a miscarriage which occurs there when she's four months pregnant, then her dog, and finally, on the evening of her housewarming, everything else.
Exit Harralsons, enter Sheehans. Buck and his wife, Anita, are trying to recover from the loss of their only child, who went down in a flaming helicopter while serving in Vietnam. Anita, who is recovering from a mental breakdown as a result of the loss (which dovetails a little too neatly with the loss of her father and brother years before in a similar accident), begins to see movies of her son's horrible death on the television in the house. A neighbor who is helping out also catches part of this lethal film. Other stuff happens . . . there is a climax . . . and exit Sheehans. Then, last but hardly least in terms of the grand guignol, comes the Greenes.
If all this sounds familiar, it comes as no surprise to either of us. The House Next Door is a frame story, the sort of thing one likes to speculate, that Chaucer might have done if he had written for Weird Tales. It is a form of horror tale that the movies have tried more often than novelists or short-story writers. In fact, the moviemakers seem to have tried a good many times to put a dictum that critics of the genre have handed down for years into actual practice: that the horror tale works best when it is brief and comes directly to the point (most people associate that dictum with Poe, but Coleridge stated it before him, and in fact Poe was offering a guideline for the writer of all short stories, not just those dealing with the supernatural and the occult). Interestingly enough, the dictum seems to fail in actual practice. Most horror movies employing the frame-story device to tell three or four short tales work unevenly or not at all.4
Does The House Next Door work? I think it does. It doesn't work as well as it could work, and the reader is left with what may be the wrong set of ambiguities about Walter and Colquitt Kennedy, but still, it works.
"[The House Next Door] came about, I suspect," Ms. Siddons writes, "because I have always been fond of the horror or occult genre, or whatever you may call it. It seemed to me that most of my favorite writers had tackled the ghost story at one time or another. Henry James, Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dickens, et al., and I have enjoyed the more contemporary writers in the genre as much as I have the old classicists. Shirley Jackson's Hill House is as nearly perfect a haunted-house tale as I have ever read . . . and [my favorite of all time, I think is] M. F. K. Fisher's enchanting little The Lost, Strayed, Stolen.
"The point would seem to be that, as every foreword to every anthology of horror stories you ever read assures you, the ghost story is timeless; it cuts across all lines of culture and class and all levels of sophistication; it communicates immediately somewhere in the vicinity of the base of your spine, and touches that crouching thing in all of us that still peers in abject terror past the fire into the dark beyond the cave door. If all cats are gray in the dark, so, basically, are all people afraid of it.
"The haunted house has always spoken specially and directly to me as the emblem of particular horror. Maybe it's because, to a woman, her house is so much more than that: it is kingdom, responsibility, comfort, total world to her . . . to most of us, anyway, whether or not we are aware of it. It is an extension of ourselves; it tolls in answer to one of the most basic chords mankind will ever hear. My shelter. My earth. My second skin. Mine. So basic is it that the desecration of it, the corruption, as it were, by something alien takes on a peculiar and bone-deep horror and disgust. It is both frightening and . . . violating, like a sly, terrible burglar. A house askew is one of the not-rightest things in the world, and is terrible out of all proportion to its actual visitant. . . .
"I came to write of a new house that was . . . let's say malignant . . . for the very simple reason that I wanted to see if I could write a good ghost story. . . . I was tired and rather simple-minded from a two-year stint of heavy, serious, 'writery' writing, yet I wanted to be at work, and thought the ghost story would be fun . . . and as I was casting about in my mind for a good hook, or handle, a young architect bought the lovely, wooded lot next to our house and began to build a contemporary house on it. My writing room, upstairs under the eaves of our old house, looks right into the lot next door, and I would sit and stare dreamily out my window and watch the wild woods and hills go down and the house go up, and one day the inevitable 'What if' that starts all writers writing bloomed in my mind, and we were off. 'What if,' I thought, 'instead of an ancient haunted priory on the coast of Cornwall or a pre-Revolutionary farmhouse in Bucks County with a visitant or two, or even the ruins of an antebellum plantation house with a hoop-skirted spectre wailing around the desecrated chimney for her lost world, you had a brand-new contemporary going up in an affluent suburb of a large city? You'd expect the priory and the farmhouse and the plantation to be haunted. But the contemporary? Wouldn't that give it an even meaner, nastier, little fillip? Serve to emphasize by contrast and horror? I thought it would. . . .
"I'm still not sure how I arrived at the idea that the house would use its sheer loveliness to attract people, and then begin to turn their own deepest weaknesses, their soft spots, against them. It seems to me that in this day of pragmatists and materialists, a conventional spectre would be almost laughable; in the suburb that I envisioned, the people do not believe in that sort of thing; it is almost improper. A traditional ghoulie would be laughed out of the neighborhood. So what would get to my quasi-sophisticated suburbanite? What would break relationships and crumble defenses and penetrate suburban armors? It would have to be different in each case. Each person has his own built-in horror button. Let's have a house that can isolate and push it, and then you've really got a case of the suburban willies.
"The plot of the book emerged in one typewriter sitting almost whole and in infinite detail, as though it had been there all along just waiting to be uncovered. . . . The House Next Door was plotted and whole in a day. From there it looked to be great fun, and I set off on it with a light heart, because I thought it would be an easy book to write. And in a sense, it was: these are my people. I am of this world. I know them from the skin out. They were of course, caricatures in most cases; most of the people I know are, thankfully, far more eccentric and not so determinedly suburban as this set of folks. But I needed them to be the way they were to make a point. And I found the limning of them went like greased lightning.
"Because the whole point of this book, of course, is not so much the house and its peculiar, terrible power, but what effect it has on the neighborhood, and on the relationships between neighbors and friends, and between families, when they are forced to confront and believe the unbelievable. This has always been the power of the supernatural to me . . . that it blasts and breaks relationships between people and other people and between people and their world and, in a way, between people and the very essences of themselves. And the blasting and breaking leaves them defenseless and alone, howling in terror before the thing that they have been forced to believe. For belief is everything; belief is all. Without belief, there is no terror. And I think it is even more terrible when a modern man or woman, girded
round with privilege and education and all the trappings of the so-called good life and all the freight of the clever, pragmatic, vision-hungry modern mind, is forced to confront utter, alien, and elemental evil and terror. What does he know of this, what has it to do with him? What has the unspeakable and the unbelievable got to do with second homes and tax shelters and private schools for the kids and a pate in every terrine and a BMW in every garage? Primitive man might howl before his returning dead and point; his neighbor would see, and howl along with him. . . . The resident of Fox Run Chase who meets a ghoulie out by the hot tub is going to be frozen dead in his or her Nikes on the tennis courts the next day if he or she persists in gabbling about it. And there he is, alone with the horror and ostracized on all sides. It's a double turn of the screw, and I thought it would make a good story.
"I still think it did . . . I think it holds up well. . . . But it is only now that I am able to read the book with any equanimity. About a third of the way through it, the writing ceased to be fun and became something as oppressive to me as it was obsessive; I realized I was into something vast and terrible and not at all funny; I was hurting and destroying people or allowing them to be hurt and destroyed, which amounts to the same thing. There is in me . . . some leftover streak of Puritan ethic, or squinty-eyed Calvinistic morality, that insists that THINGS MUST HAVE A POINT. I dislike anything gratuitous. Evil must not be allowed to get away unpunished, even though I know that it does, every day. Ultimately . . . there must be a day of reckoning for the Bad Thing, and I still have no idea if this is a strength or weakness. . . . It certainly does not lend itself to subtleties, but I do not see myself as a 'clever' writer. And so The House Next Door became very serious business indeed to me; I knew that Colquitt and Walter Kennedy, whom I really liked very much indeed, would be destroyed by the house they in turn destroyed at the end of the book, but to me there was very real gallantry in the fact that they knew this themselves, and went ahead anyway . . . I was glad they did not run away . . . I would hope that, faced with something as overwhelmingly vast and terrible and left with so few options, I would have the grace and courage to do as they did. I speak of them as though they were outside my control because I feel as if they are, and most of the way through the book I felt this. . . . There is an inevitability about the outcome . . . that, to me, was inherent even on the first page of the book. It happened this way because this is the way it would have happened in this time and this place to these people. That is a satisfying feeling to me, and it is not one that I have had about all my books. And so in that sense, I feel that it succeeds. . . .