Yesterday,  we started talking about haunted houses, about the kind of moods they create in us, and the different kinds of haunted houses that are to be found in literature.  Our exploration started with the irregular, or the illogical houses–the kind that seem to grow or change…the kind that seem to be reacting to their occupants throughout the course of the story.

The second kind of house is the rational one.  These houses conform to all the laws of physics, and look the same on the inside and the outside, regardless of where you are standing.  What marks these houses is the evil that lives within them.

These kinds of houses are alive, just as the irregular ones are.  But, rather than playing with their occupants, they just outright hate them.  These houses are malevolent, and they tend to attract malevolent people, actions, or events to them–Stephen King called it a “dry charge for evil”.  Even if you know these houses inside and out, even if you know where all the doors and windows might be, this kind of house is still a source of terror.  Indeed, it’s precisely the fact that you do know the house so well that they are scary.

Because there are always questions–why someone did what they did in that house.  What drove them to madness.  When they will reappear….and will you be able to bear it?

It’s tricky to get these kind of houses right.  They often rely on terror, rather than horror, meaning that they act on characters, rather than act themselves–people living in them get nightmares, like in Hell House, or they hallucinate (or do they?!), as happens in Hill House.  Other times, characters have evil visited upon them, as happens in the Marsden House, or the house on Neibolt Street.

There aren’t many technicolor effects in these houses–no growing hallways or moving rooms.  Instead, these houses rely on the threat implicit in a slammed door…or a creaking floor board….the kind of things that under normal circumstances wouldn’t be at all scary.  But in these circumstances, in this place, with this history, it is absolutely terrifying.

Want to experience some of these houses for yourself?  Why not take a visit to some of the most ghastly houses in literature for this year’s All Hallows Read?

It: Stephen King is not only a prolific author, and a favorite here at the Free For All–he’s also crafts some of the best haunted houses around.  If you saw this summer’s blockbuster hit It, you’ll know a bit about the house on Niebolt Street, but, as per usual, the book does it better.  The house at 29 Niebolt Street is Pennywise’s liar, and the entire building reeks of his malevolence, but nevertheless, the Losers, the young children brave enough to face down this evil clown, forge their way in.  27 years later, they return to Derry, Maine, to face the evil again.  Stephen King does a brilliant job discussing issues of trauma and memory, nostalgia and horror in this epic story, making it one you won’t want to put down, and will be eager to read again and again.

The Haunting of Hill House: Shirley Jackson’s haunted house is a bit of a puzzler.  We’re not told specifically what is wrong  with the house.  But we are told that it’s not sane.  But how much of what happens in the course of this story is a result of the house’s inherent insanity, and how much is due to the instability of Eleanor Vance, the main character of this novel, and one of a small group of people invited to stay inside Hill House and witness its strangeness?  We aren’t given any answers–at sometimes, the narrative itself seems to defy logic.  But it’s that instability and inscrutability that makes this story so affecting.

Hell House: If you want to meet the embodiment of Cold War, mid-century despair, look no further than Richard Matheson.  His writing is stunning, but it’s also brutal, unsettling, and challenging on a number of levels.  In this story, a group of paranormal researchers take a visit to a house that is known to have killed inhabitants before–in fact, they are taking a survivor of the house, who escaped as a child, back, to see what it will do to him as an adult.  The Belasco House seeps inside the mind of those who live there, making them confront the very worst of their own natures.  As a result, there is a lot that is off-putting about this story, but there is also a lot of insight into the human mind and the limits of each character, making it a really interesting addition to this list.

Happy reading, beloved patrons….and don’t mind that noise on the stairs…..

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…