Hell House vs. Hill House

Warning: This post may contain spoilers for Richard Matheson’s Hell House.

Two library books sit side by side on my coffee table. Both about haunted mansions left empty for decades and what happens to the groups of strangers who investigate them. Both follow four characters—one scientist, two sensitives, and one average person. Many of the scenes have a strange ring of déjà vu—Matheson’s Florence recoils away from the chapel the same way Jackson’s Eleanor does from the library. The first three words of one title is in a smaller, less-conspicuous font, so at first glance even their titles look the same: Hill House and Hell House. I don’t think Richard Matheson makes any apologies about his novel being a knockoff of Shirley Jackson’s. It may have been his attempt to do it right, since his book avoids many of the problems I had with The Haunting of Hill House. His book, though an improvement in many ways, lacks in some ways that Shirley Jackson’s does not.

For starters, Matheson’s characters are compelling because they’re each well-developed and complex of their own right, and each has a well-defined goal that hinges upon surviving the experience. Florence, a mental medium, wants the payout money—one hundred thousand dollars—for her church. Dr. Barrett wants to prove the legitimacy of his work and his theories. Edith doesn’t want to be separated from her husband, lest she suffer crippling anxiety, the account of which gives us an early warning that she’s dealing with emotional instability. And Fischer (whom I keep wanting to call Luke due to his relatively passive role) wants to unload the emotional baggage that’s plagued him since his first traumatic visit to the house. He says he’s sticking it out for the money, but he really wants to best Emeric Belasco and prove his individual worth. And that focus on his worth—proving himself—his ego—is a set up for his insight to what drives Belasco, and to what will be Belasco’s undoing.

Matheson’s characters ping off each other in a reasonably interesting fashion and everybody possesses likeable qualities, but they don’t enjoy the witty repartee that Shirley Jackson’s characters do. Matheson’s characters experience interesting divisive circumstances, but since they’d never experienced the playful closeness of Jackson’s characters, the relationship arc seems less dramatic.

The clearest difference, though, that I see between these two books is mood. The two authors manage tension in completely different fashions. I complained that Shirley Jackson allowed the tension to dissipate too much—that she actively dismantled it—between scenes. But her scary scenes did the job of invoking fear (except for art-hating Philistines like Michael Ingram.) Jackson uses fear of solitude and fears of the unnatural and the unknown to excellent effect. Matheson, on the other hand, never really allows the reader to let his or her guard down—weird stuff could happen at any moment, day or night—but there aren’t very many fear-invoking scenes. The overall reader feel was one of interest, anxiety and concern, even, but not actually fear. Either I’m becoming very rapidly inured to ghost stories (which I doubt, because I’m a wimp) or Hell House is an example of revealing too much of the monster.  “Once you can see ‘it,’ your brain can quantify it and it becomes less frightening” (Johnson, 102).

Despite the absence of humor and fear elements, Hell House is the stronger of the two books on the basis of there not being anything glaringly wrong with it. The hook is still great, the tension is consistent, the characters are complex, and the plot took several turns I didn’t expect. I prefer the more modern close-third POV to Jackson’s impersonal omniscient. Both books, though, are worth reading and have earned spots on my shelf. The library books go back tomorrow, right about when I expect Amazon to deliver their replacements.

Works Cited

Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.

Johnson, Scott. “Blurring the Line: How Reality Helps Build Better Fiction.” Many Genres One Craft. Ed. Michael A. Arnzen and Heidi Ruby Miller. Terra Alta: Headline Books, Inc. 100-104. Print

Matheson, Richard. Hell House. New York: Tor, 1999. Print.

Review: The Haunting of Hill House

Is this really the same Shirley Jackson who wrote “The Lottery”? The slowly-building style is there, but where’s all the richness? The symbolism? Maybe I need to give the book another read to find it, and at 246 pages I could probably squeeze that in, but I think I expected more—though the humor and the witty banter lent a charm I wasn’t expecting.

I’ve made it sound like I disliked The Haunting of Hill House, but I didn’t. I loved it. It just wasn’t what I expected. I love Shirley Jackson’s slow-building exposition, setting up the situation and the selection of the cast of characters. On page 6, when Shirley Jackson explains the various reasons others didn't join the group, she says simply of those who did: “The other two came.” 

Maybe it's my imagination, maybe I was already keyed up for a scary story, but I read that line as the action by which they damned themselves. To me, it was too straightforward to be anything but foreboding. And when a little old lady quickly changes her “Damn you” attitude to “I’ll be praying for you,” I have to wonder if the protagonist Eleanor is going to be needing all the divine intervention she can get.

Jackson set up Eleanor’s nothing-to-lose situation through her unhappy relationship with her mother, her bullying sister, and her interest in just about anything—from an empty field, to a secluded cottage near a depressing town—so long as it is away from home. She’s so awkward and sad that standing up to her sister and taking the car counts as her "save the cat" moment.

I don’t know that Shirley Jackson does anything by accident. I wonder if the two sisters, squabbling over the car was intentionally set up to mirror the situation of the two Crain sisters who squabble over Hill House. The latter’s disastrous consequences set up the result for the other, so I needn’t have been surprised when it added badly. Lesson learned from Professor Shirley Jackson: Don’t fight with your sister.

When Theodora is introduced, she brings life and banter and joy to the character set. Eleanor becomes wittier after her arrival, and their cheerfulness is  a welcome change to the stern and foreboding backdrop of the house. But then, Luke’s wit sounds a lot like Theodora’s too, so maybe all of the characters are written with the same voice—Shirley Jackson’s. Nevertheless, I needed those moments of levity between dark scenes of oppressive fear, but I wonder if Jackson relaxed the tension too much in those moments. It seems everyone is safe so long as the sun is up, and not every night is eventful, so at times I think I relaxed too much.

Still, I could learn a thing or two from Jackson’s ability to build an anxiety-filled scene. In the four pages from Eleanor’s arrival in the blue room until the sound of Theodora’s car door, Jackson had me terrified, and I think it’ because Eleanor, too, is terrified by then. After looking out the window she’s “afraid to go back across the room.” But even before that the descriptions are all qualified with negativity—“unbelievably faulty design,” “pressing silence,” and “the sunlight came only palely through.” Still, I’m not sure what exactly is wrong with the room, but I’m afraid every time she’s in it.

At the end of chapter 4, after the first nighttime fright with the banging on doors and trying the knobs, Dr. Montague says, “Doesn’t it begin to seem that the intention is, somehow, to separate us?” That’s a turning point in the book, because at that point we know the house’s game. But it waits. No more overt separations. Instead, it lets them separate themselves when they react to stress and confinement, judging each other's actions, motives, and characters and assuming the worst. The house sets them on a course, but it’s their reactions to paranormal occurrences that drive wedges between them, not some persistent phantom dog. And Eleanor’s attitude toward the spirit of the house turns from fear to acceptance, and she begins to relish being the one who can hear the chattering song—being special in some way—which she is because the house is singling her out, ostensibly because she’s experienced poltergeists before. Speaking of which, isn’t Theodora supposed to be special too? Isn’t she telepathic? Why hasn’t that come up after page 8? Is she a fake?

As for the symbolism I was looking for, should I read more into the oleanders? The “Journeys end in lovers meeting” refrain? Should I try to read more into Dr. Montague’s name—like Romeo, he’s fated to want what’s forbidden? Seems a stretch. Maybe her symbols went over my head this time, but the absence of meaningful symbols and motifs in The Haunting of Hill House makes me think those overly-eager high school lit. teachers may have been reading too much into “The Lottery.” 

Disclaimer

If it looks like I'm reviewing books/movies for a class, that's because I am. If reading ghost stories for graduate credit sounds like something you want to do, check out Seton Hill's MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction.

https://www.setonhill.edu/academics/graduate_programs/fiction

My Name is Kristin, and I Write Genre Fiction

"The notion that popular fiction is easy fiction is a self-congratulatory myth perpetuated by elites...But when a writer is spinning a yarn of a particular type, a genre tale, then even more special knowledge is required to win over an audience, not less." Michael A. Arnzen, Many Genres, One Craft

I just have to post about this because I'm getting pretty sick of taking shit for wanting to write the kinds of books I'd want to read. 

   I appreciate Dr. Arnzen's defense of genre fiction. He does it all the time--in writing, in class, in the hallway outside of the cafeteria. It's like he can't help himself. Or like he's been called a hack one time too many, and he's had it. Sometimes in the course of doing what I do and meeting the people I meet, I forget this is an artistic endeavor I'm pursuing. To create is to be creative--and it's hard, hard work. I should hold my head up and be proud of what I do, even when surrounded by the literati.

Still, there's that literary vs. genre thing, and I'm not entirely certain I can identify literary fiction when I see it. I've heard it defies categorization in a single genre. By that definition, all hybrid novels would be literature. From what I can tell--and this is my prejudice talking--I recognize literary fiction when the author uses poetic language and complexity to make a piece sound more beautiful and artistic. The writer sounds smart, but doesn't consider the reader. It's pedantic.

   To me it comes off as self-indulgent on the part of the writer to wander through flowery language and leave it to the reader to search for the meaning. Or in some cases it's not language but avoidance of structure--there again the reader is left to sort through superfluous information while he or she searches for the story. 

I'm not suggesting that writers pander to the reader and write only on demand, though I don't blame those who do--real people have real mortgages that have to be paid with real money. I might suggest, instead, that the writer keep readers in mind so the work communicates clearly, and the meaning isn't lost in translation. 

We're Doing it Wrong

My husband and I are mediocre parents. We’ve got two kids, ages 1 ½ and 3 ½, and, though we’re trying to be very conscientious about this child-rearing thing, those little guys keep reminding us that we’re not very good at it.

   For example, my oldest kid, whom I’ll call Rabbit, is sometimes super mean to his little brother, whom I’ll call Little Bear. My husband and I aren’t completely ignorant people—we’ve read Siblings Without Rivalry, and a small mountain of other parenting books, and we’ve applied Love Languages  and Love and Logic, along with a decade-and-a-half apiece of teacher training on classroom management and motivating children without conflict, but Rabbit still picks on Little Bear.

   Here’s the real problem: karma.

For ten kidless years, DH and I taught middle school, all the while quietly judging parents on how well they’re managing the parenting gig and formulating our own ideas of what kinds of parents we’ll be. Parents who take the kids to exotic locations for year-long exchanges. Parents whose kids are well-adapted to adult company, who speak multiple languages and behave well in restaurants. We saw our kids as engineers, astronauts, computer programmers, and certainly honor students; and our kids may very well turn out to be those things, but right now they’re busy reminding us that they’re running this show a bit more than we’d like.

The thing is, nothing makes me more aware of how clueless I am as when my kid’s teachers, who are usually pleased with Rabbit, tell me he didn’t behave in class. My face warms, and I break out in a sweat, and I ask the teacher—who doesn’t have kids of her own—if she has any ideas of what I should do. “Just talk to him about it,” she says.

And I do. And I defer action until after dinner, when I’ve had time to think. And my husband and I talk about it and decide to take away a special toy. Rabbit cries and says he’ll do better, and we promise to return the toy when we receive a positive report.

And we still feel very mediocre.

And the kidless teachers probably shake their heads in the staff lounge.

And we muddle our way through parenthood for another day, just like everybody else we used to judge.

Fiction Fest

I'm sticking this on my page because, I mean, read it. A Fiction Fest in Denver? I'm in!

On Trying to Write

You know what's super-difficult? Putting my writing where other people can see it.

It's a necessary evil, though, because that's the whole point. I mean, I suppose I could just scribble to my heart's content until the day I die and never actually show it to anyone, and I'm sure it would be very cathartic, but it also seems excessively timid. 

It just so happens that I came across a couple of poems I had hastily-scribbled almost ten years ago, when I was evidently feeling pretty unsure about writing. This anxiety and self-doubt has been around a little while then, I guess.

So yeah, good or bad, I'm just gonna chuck one out there. And then I'm going to go eat some gummy bears.

Open Minded

So open, I'm sure nothing's inside

Just capacious, inaccessible vacancy.

Someone locked the door.

My pen leaves streaks of illegibility

On the lined page

Cross it out. Start again.

A few more letters

Those look awkward.

Cross them out. Turn the page.

I just can't write today.

8/3/06