Danse Macabre

I guess I liked the idea itself--as divorced from any symbolism or moral reference--because it's always been difficult for me to understand why the dead would want to hang around old deserted houses, clanking chains and groaning spectrally to frighten the passerby . . . if they could go elsewhere. It sounds like a drag to me. The theory suggested that the inhabitants might indeed have gone on, leaving only a psychic residue behind. But even so (as Ke

My experience in the Marsten House with my friend crosspatched with this article and with a third element-teaching Stoker's Dracula -create the fictional Marsten House, which stands overlooking the little town of Jerusalem's Lot from its eminence not far from the Harmony Hill Cemetery. But 'Salem's Lot is a book about vampires, not hauntings; the Marsten House is really only a curlicue, the gothic equivalent of an appendix. It was there, but it wasn't doing much except lending atmosphere (it becomes a little more important in Tobe Hooper's TV-film version, but its major function still seems to be to stand up there on that hill and look broody).

So I went back to the house-as-psychic-battery idea and tried to write a story in which that concept would take center stage. The Shining is set in the apotheosis of the Bad Place: not a haunted house but a haunted hotel, with a different "real" horror movie playing in almost every one of its guest room and suites.

I needn't point out that the list of possible Bad Places does not begin with haunted houses and end with haunted hotels; there have been horror stories written about haunted railroad stations, automobiles, meadows, office buildings. The list is endless, and probably all of it goes back to the caveman who had to move out of his hole in the rock because he heard what sounded like voices back there in the shadows. Whether they were actual voices or the voices of the wind is a question we still ask ourselves on dark nights.

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 A

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 live 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 A

The House Next Door is a novel only in terms of its first-person narrator, Colquitt Ke

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 ru

Colquitee 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.