Literature is full of memorable dwelllings: From Dracula’s Castle to Manderley in Rebecca; from Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre to the Little House on the Prairie.  But there are no houses quite like the haunted house.

This time of year, there are any number of ‘haunted houses’, populated by generally well-intentioned and costumed actors whose job it is to leap out in front of you screaming bloody blue murder.  The psychological enjoyment of these houses comes from the adrenaline high that you receive by activating your ‘fight-or-flight’ response every time a new person throws themselves in front of you in the strobe-lit dark.  At least that’s what I’m told.

According to Psychology Today, there are reasons for feeling creeped out by a house that have nothing to do with other people leaping out in front of you and yelling very loudly.  In a fascinating article about the “feel” of a haunted house, they note,

Evolutionary psychologists have proposed the existence of agent detection mechanisms — or processes that have evolved to protect us from harm at the hands of predators and enemies.

If you’re walking through the woods alone at night and hear the sound of something rustling in the bushes, you’ll respond with a heightened level of arousal and attention. You’ll behave as if there is a willful “agent” present who is about to do you harm.

Moreover, these places usually lack what environmental psychologists refer to as legibility, or the ease with which a place can be recognized, organized into a pattern and recalled.  Indeed, it can lead us into thinking that a house may be consciously trying to trap us.  To keep us there forever.  To consume us whole.

Generally speaking, there are two kids of haunted houses that you can encounter in books: the horribly rational, and the cripplingly unknowable.  Both carry their own kind of fears, as well as their own kind of appeal.  Depending on what actually makes the hair on your arms stand up, you might be drawn to one kind or the other in your reading.  Rest assured, however, that the Library is well-equipped to help you navigate both these sorts of houses in your All-Hallows Reading (and any other time of the year, as well!)

The first, and perhaps the more well-known sort of haunted house (or, perhaps the correct term is the animate house) is the irrational one.  These houses may look ‘normal’ on the outside (depending on your architectural definition of ‘normal’), but once a hapless guest crosses the threshold, they abandon all pretenses and become absolutely irrational.  They lose all legibility.

These houses generally trap their occupants inside, foiling all their attempts to escape.  Rooms grow out of nowhere, corridors grow uncommonly long or short, and doors appear where no doors ever opened.  There is a temporal element to these houses, too…often, they sit on a rift in space-time (like Slade House), or they straddle multiple times (like the house in You Should Have Left or the hotel in Travelers Rest) .  Sometimes, they are a conscious character in the book; in The House of Leaves, the house seems to growl as it reshapes…it is both the labyrinth and the monster that guards it.  All of these houses challenge our understanding of space and of time, making anything, and everything, seem chillingly possible.

Readers eager to explore these houses should definitely check out the following:

Slade House: David Mitchell’s contribution to the horror genre is a weird book…The entrance to Slade House appears (and disappears) along a brick wall in a narrow London alleyway every nine years to admit a guest chosen by the brother and sister who dwell within–a loner, someone who probably won’t be remembered…This book features five such episodes in the ghastly house’s history, and, once you understand how Slade House works, there is very little surprise about what will happen in each tale.  That being said, it’s genuinely terrifying each and every time.  I have never been bored and scared out of my wits at the same time by the same book.  So for that reason alone, Slade House is a book I won’t soon forget.

Travelers Rest: Rather than a house, the entity at the center of Keith Lee Morris’ book is a hotel, the titular Travelers Rest, located in the nearly-abandoned mining town of Good Night, Idaho.  The story starts when a family, Tonio and Julia and their son Dewey, who are taking Tonio’s alcoholic brother home, are forced off the road in a blizzard, and into the Travelers Rest.  Each member of the family experiences a different, labyrinth-like hell in this hotel, and in this town, and in time, making it a surprisingly complex book.  This is one of the most deep-thinking on this list of haunted domiciles, but, for that, it’s also one of the most interesting.

You Should Have Left: Though it’s only 111 pages, German author Daniel Kehlmann’s contribution to the haunted house genre is packed from the very first pages with subtle hints and warnings about the insanity of the mountaintop home he has rented for a family vacation.  Told in journal form, this book chronicles a single week in this odd house…to tell you more would be to give away the best aspects of this story, but I guarantee that you’ll be flipping back and forth as you read in order to confirm if your own grasp on reality is slipping…or if you did just read that….

 

 

Tune in tomorrow for our look at some other kinds of haunted houses…