The Amityville Horror--Déjà Vu All Over Again

This post contains spoilers for Jay Anson's novel The Amityville Horror.

I can’t be the only person reading this and feeling the arc and "reader feels" of The Shining, which, since I read it two weeks ago is still very fresh in my mind. The Amityville Horror has a slow-burning start with loads of backstory. Unlike The Shining, anything horrific is told with emotional detachment, so it doesn’t feel gut wrenching. At all. It’s a little inferior in that respect, but not terribly. Also unlike The Shining these characters don’t seem to have anything particularly wrong with them. They were just fine—right up until they encountered the house. But there is a similarity. It (the house/demonic force) affects each of the family members differently, and one family member in particular. And that one is the five year old. Everyone’s behavior changes, but the dad becomes impatient, particularly with the children. And it’s cold. And that hedge/stone lion moves. And being born with a caul causes psychic ability. Rip off.

But then Twilight was a rip off of Pride and Prejudice, and did I like it? Damned straight, I did.

I’m not saying it’s not worth reading. In fact, I think I enjoyed this reading experience better because once the tension built, it maintained a consistent level of enjoyable WTF, without pushing me beyond my comfort zone. Stephen King, however, almost always pushes me past where I’m comfortable. Some things I particularly liked: The way the house affects EVERYONE, including those who simply visit. AND that a momentary interaction with the house is enough for them to carry its malevolence away with them, like a virus. The priest with his car trouble, flu, and blisters. The brother and his money. Even the paranormal investigator who catches the flu before even arriving. It’s interesting that the house’s power isn’t constrained to just the property on which it stands. It tags along, effing things up for people who even think about the place. That’s fun.

Gawd, I’m shaping up to be such a pessimist. I hate to harp on what I didn’t like. Really, The Amityvile Horror was a fun read, and I didn’t want to put it down. I’d totally read another Jay Anson book—probably 666, which is the only one he wrote between Amityville Horror (1977) and his death in 1980.

But sometimes the action in this book was down-right irritating. Like, hey, crazy shit is happening in this house. Stone lions moving, weird smells, unseen presences, but it doesn’t even occur to Kathy, the mom, that the green goo could be a paranormal manifestation too (226). It must be those blasted kids. And when George (the dad) brings his dog inside to see if he senses anything, the dog reacts to exactly the things we expect him to—the secret room in the cellar, the sewing room, and Missy’s room. And George acts like he doesn’t understand why the dog would possibly behave strangely—“‘Goddammit, Harry…What’s bugging you?’”—when that’s exactly why he’s dragging the dog room-to-room in the first place. And then—“‘Nothing happened, that’s what happened,’ he said” (259). Perhaps he was expecting the dog to write a dissertation regarding his suspicions and discomfort, since George is blind to canine forms of communication. Sigh.

And then there’s the priest—Father Mancuso. I get why he wouldn’t want to go back to the house, but why doesn’t he just send another priest. Or someone to attempt an exorcism? He’s just like, “Sorry, suckas—you’re on your own. I’m not going to help you, therefore the Church can’t help you.” Thanks, buddy. May your itchy palms sprout humiliating hairs.

Based on a true story, my ass. But I wonder how much it increases a book’s sales if you swear on your grandmother’s grave that it’s true. Not that I’m interested in besmirching my grandmother’s grave. I’m just curious. Ahem. For a friend, of course.

Anson, Jay. The Amityville Horror. New York: Pocket Star, 1977. Print.

The Others—It’s a Lot Like That One Movie

Hey.

This post contains spoilers for the movie The Others. Don’t read on unless you’ve already watched it.

And if you haven't, you need to.

The Others opened like any good horror movie should—with a scream. Okay, maybe it did strike me as a little cliché, but I didn’t mind the cheap gag. The producers were forgiven as soon as the camera panned out to include the antique architecture and décor—I could watch that all day. In fact, since this movie was filmed on location rather than on a sound stage, I watched it a second time just to focus on the set.

So here's what happens: A mom and her two allergic-to-light kids live in a fabulous old house in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Oh, and that house is probably haunted. The mom hires random strangers as house help, and the audience gets the definite idea there’s something dodgy with them, but they’re more likable than the main character. The kids allege that the house is haunted by a boy named Victor—which is a scary effing name if you ask me (I’m talking about you, Cypert)—and a lot of not much happens, but I think we’re supposed to be frightened by paranormal occurrences and the diminishing sanity of the mom. The husband/father comes back from WWII. Then he leaves because he’s not real. The mom gets crazier. The ghosts (or the Others) manifest until we realize that they’re the real people and Nicole Kidman and her kids have been dead all along. And, oh yeah, she killed them. That was the scary part—a mom who loves her kids can kill them in a fit of insanity.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find this movie scary at all—and my husband would totally call me out on it because he was trying to sleep and I kept waking him up to keep me company. (That’s happened a lot this semester.) But it took a long time to build tension. I don’t mind that so much—I wasn’t bored—I just wasn’t scared. I doubt anyone was terribly surprised to find out the house-help were dead, or that the war-scarred husband/father was also dead, so in that way I started to smell an element of The Sixth Sense, and even said so to my unconscious husband. And still, after saying it aloud to him, it didn’t even cross my mind the flip the writer would pull, with the entire main cast being ghosts, haunted by the living in their spaces. And I do so love that concept. Imagine ghosts being terrified of the “normal” activity around them. Clever. Better than Beetlejuice.

I know we’ve talked about that good surprise/bad surprise thing in our Horror RIG discussions, and in that conversation several of you talked about disliking the twist for the sake of the twist or something like that. Because it gets old. And, yeah, it probably does, especially if the writer/director makes a habit of it, and you expect it. So maybe in this genre the more widely read you are, the less you enjoy the experience—picking up clues and patterns faster. But I didn’t see it coming this time. And I flipping loved it. But when I watched it the second time, it was really just some boring stuff that happened in a beautiful old house.

The Others. Dir. Alejandro Amenábar. Perf. Nicole Kidman. Buena Vista, 2001. DVD.

The Shining--Colorado from an outsider's perspective. There was snow. And big deer things.

I love Stephen King’s work. Yeah, that’s what I meant.

His interviews are pretty amusing.

This: 

Stephen King On Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, Lovecraft & More (55:51)

And this: 

Has Stephen King Won Writing?

And I love his insights on the creative lifestyle, pantsing vs. plotting, and substance abuse in

Since this was my third read of The Shining I thought I’d listen to the audiobook. A good idea on paper, maybe, but it turns out I read a little faster to myself than Campbell Scott does aloud, so that wasn’t really saving me time. And I missed Stephen King’s voice. I couldn’t hear it while someone else was reading. So I read it the usual way. Again. And I liked it again.

I used to have a quote on my classroom wall that read, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” ― Heraclitus

That’s how I felt about reading The Shining again. It was not the same book for me this time. I’m not the same person. I’m a mom now. It took me three days to get through the arm-breaking scene this time because I had to keep walking away from it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other parents felt similarly. I think in my pre-kids days I found the same scene upsetting, but probably not as nauseating.

You know what else I am? A fault-finder. I should really knock that off because I think (whatever…I KNOW) it’s getting in the way of my enjoyment of reading. Stephen King is SO GOOD at writing disturbing stuff, but I totally got hung up on his classic outsider misconception of how much snow falls in Colorado. “By November the snow up there in the mountains would be higher than the beetle’s roof…maybe higher than three beetles stacked on top of each other” (33). Colorado is a high desert. Sure a freak storm could dump snow like that, but you know what's a more common sight in Estes Park in December? The ground. Snow falls, then after a week or two it either melts off or sublimates because it’s too damned dry to stick around. Stephen King lives in Bangor, Maine, where the average annual snowfall is 56 inches. (www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/maine/bangor). You know what it is in Estes Park? 34 inches. If all the snow for the entire year fell at once, it would just about reach a VW’s door handle. But, whatevs, it was a snow year for the Torrance family.

I was able to get over the Overlook not ACTUALLY being the Stanley Hotel—the hotel that inspired the book. “Some of the most beautiful resort hotels in the world are located in Colorado, but the hotel in these pages is based on none of them. The Overlook and the people associated with it exist wholly within the author’s imagination." So the Overlook is in the middle of nowhere and NOT actually right behind a Safeway and a McDonalds. And in StephenKingLand, Colorado gets a lot more precipitation. You know what else Colorado has in StephenKingLand? Caribou.

“We might see some deer. Or caribou” (61). “They had seen caribou tracks in the snow and once the caribou themselves, a group of five standing motionlessly below the security fence” (213).

I double checked this to be certain, because at first I was like, “What? Caribou?” But yeah. Not here. “The last herd of caribou to roam as far south as Colorado probably lived during the Pleistocene” http://www.denverpost.com/ci_4514208?source=rss

I have seen a real live caribou in Colorado. Someone up at Keystone had one on a leash and he tied it to a tree while he stopped in at a bar. The caribou waited outside like a patient Labrador. That’s because caribou (reindeer) are domesticable. If they weren’t, Santa would have to get sled dogs.

Caribou:

We have elk though. They’re a lot bigger. I don’t think I’d try to walk one with a leash. They can be kind of mean.

Elk:  

Lesson: Even if your name is Stephen Effing King, do your homework or you’ll irritate your readers. And the guy lived here (in Boulder) when he wrote The Shining, but, you know, in 1974 Al Gore hadn’t yet invented the internet.

King, Stephen. The Shining. New York: Anchor Books, 2012.

Ghost Story: It gave me nightmares. Truth.

Ghost Story, by Peter Straub

This post may contain spoilers. They won’t likely affect your enjoyment of the book.

From the cover:

“The scariest book I’ve ever read...It crawls under your skin and into your dreams.”

   –Chicago Sun-Times

“The terror just mounts and mounts.”

   –Stephen King

So. Was is scary? You’d better believe it.

Did it keep me up at night? Damn straight.

My copy of Ghost Story, by Peter Straub, is 567 terrifying pages long. That’s about 67-117 pages longer than the romance novels I'd typically devour in a day. I figured I’d be through this in about that length of time. I wasn’t. This book held me in its not-very-captivating grip for seven days. I couldn’t stop putting it down. And the nightmares—I’d startle awake terrified of not finishing my assignment in time and failing out of my degree program. Did I mention I have a little bit of school-based anxiety? That was really the source of my panic, and this book, after eating hours of work time, left me disoriented, disenchanted, and behind in my other schoolwork. It’s magical in its ability to suck time, while still not managing to entertain.

The good news: I was able to read even before bed without being frightened by the plot.

The bad news: I kept falling asleep. 

It’s not that the book’s story concept was a failure. It’s not that the characters weren’t richly developed. It’s not that the prose lacks poetic or skillful turns of phrase. It’s just that it took Straub so effing long to get to the point.

Lesson learned and applied to my manuscript, so it wasn’t a total waste.

When professional writers say, "Don't use a prologue. Readers skip them," I have difficulty believing them. I'd never in my life been tempted to skip a prologue. Until this one. It’s monotonous and long, and nothing much happens.

For 26 pages.

I hoped that by the end I'd have a different opinion and think it was brilliant, but I'd've set this book down approximately 26 times before chapter one even commenced if it hadn’t been an assignment.

Maybe it’s evidence of my microwave-generation culture that I expect to be interested in a book right away. But I sucked it up and gave this slow-starter a chance. I made it to Part Two on page 155, at which point I wrote in my notes: Stuff’s happened. People have died. So have the sheep. I'm still having trouble caring. I mean, if killing off animals doesn't get a rise out of me, someone's doing something wrong.

And by page 290: Oh look, another character is dead. I have no attachment, therefore no grief, but also no anxiety or fear. What a let down.

By page 500 so many characters had been bumped off it was looking like Hamlet or a George R. R. Martin book. I figured they were all going to die. I still didn’t care. Straub could have used lessons on tension-maintenance, constructing fear, and maybe some of Heidi Ruby Miller’s advice on pacing. Perhaps we could send him a copy of Many Genres One Craft. Or perhaps one of us should rewrite it. Wouldn’t it be interesting to pull a Richard Matheson and revisit this plot—do it right?

Since sexism has been a recurring topic in our books thus far, I might as well voice my complaint regarding this one. Straub’s portrayal of women sucks. And if Kristin Molnar and Rasheedah Shahid-Tezak don’t speak more to this in their blogs, I’ll have to revisit the subject in greater detail in my comments. They’re more articulate than I about feminism and equality. I’ll say this though: I was born in 1979 so the year was good to me, but if this book’s outlook is any indication of American culture at the time, I’m not sorry to have been more interested in primary colors and milk bottles.

Anyone happen to know the going rate for a Stephen King endorsement? I mean, he got paid for that, right?

Straub, Peter. Ghost Story. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979. Print.

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