Recommendation: The Unquiet House by Alison Littlewood

I love haunted houses, me. I love Hill House, I love Hell House, I love The House Next Door and the House Of Leaves.

And now I think I love Mire House, too.

For Alison Littlewood's new(ish) novel is a haunted house novel to rank with all the above; where the house is not just a home for spooky beings, but a corruption of all a house should actually be; an archetypal 'bad place'; a mirror of its inhabitant's hopes and fears; a trap.

The Unquiet House is told in four interlocking sections, starting in the present day and then working back to the 1973, then to 1939, before finally coming back to 2013 - it almost reads like three self-contained novellas about a different generation's experiences at Mire House. But the historical parts of the novel provide a rich and plausible justification for the terrors in the present, and at the end Mire House is left still standing, still unquiet (still "not sane" as Shirley Jackson would no doubt have it) and still occupied by... something. And there's a strong suggestion that all is not over, and that another generation is about to be trapped and consumed by the horrors of the past.

I love haunted houses, me.

Recommendation: House Of Small Shadows by Adam Nevill

One thing I always like about Adam Nevill’s books is that, as well as thinking about the story itself, his work always makes me think about the horror genre in general - about my own beliefs about how horror works. From his novels I assume (perhaps wrongly) that Nevill is the kind of writer who is thoroughly aware of the tradition he works in as he writes, and some of that consciousness about the tropes and themes of horror seems to rub off on me when reading.

Which is possibly the most self-absorbed and pretentious start to a review I've written, but sod it.

Nevill’s latest novel, House Of Small Shadows, is a very different beast to the last of his books I mentioned on here: The Ritual was a wilderness based horror about people trying to stay alive - as I said at the time, it was a novel driven by the fear of death. By contrast, House Of Small Shadows never seems to place its central character (an antique valuer called Catherine) in any mortal peril. Instead, the novel is shot-through with another, equal, terror: the terror of losing one’s own sense of self.

Death is a loss of self, of course, but so is madness, especially when madness is seen not as something internal but as some external force, remaking someone's thoughts in its own image. Catherine is subjected to just such a force when she is invited to value a treasure-trove of taxidermy, puppets, and priceless dolls at The Red House. The house is occupied by the wheelchair bound Edith and her silent housekeeper Maude, and neither it nor they seem to have changed in nearly a hundred years. Isolated, remote, and with a somewhat clichéd lack of phone signal, The Red House is a world unto itself, a microcosm that Catherine becomes trapped in.

It’s a better reader than me, I'm afraid, who won’t become frustrated with Catherine’s repeated decisions to leave the house which she she fails to follow through on. To be fair, the threat she half-senses in the house is somewhat nebulous, but Catherine’s listlessness in the face of it causes a few pacing issues around the halfway mark, at least for me. Still, when she does finally attempt to leave, the resulting episode in the nearby village, where strange rituals and pageants are enacted by what she takes to be wizened, shrunken old people, is like a Ramsey Campbell or Ligotti story in its intensity and half-seen imagery.

And really, this is where Nevill seems to excel - at vivid imagery, at atmosphere. And what is horror fiction if not the art of sustaining atmosphere? The book overflows with macabre detail and suggestion, the implications piling up for the reader in the same way they seem to be piling up for Catherine - each event perhaps something she could cope with individually, but the cumulative effect threatens to overwhelm her. The fevered, claustrophobic Red House (like Hill House before it...) seems to reflect and amplify the fears and neuroses that Catherine brings with her from the outside world, from her troubled past. (Her back-story is wonderfully dovetailed with the present day action). There's the constant sense that her sanity is being eroded by what she encounters in the Red House, and that the space which sanity leaves is open for invasion by something more dominant. The reader worries that, like the stuffed animals and the taxidermy displays, Catherine will be remade, twisted into another’s poses, fashioned by an older and crueller view of existence into something she's not. Or is the real fear that she was like that, or along? The ending of the novel is without respite, without pity, and a finale that is, in its own way, darker than anything in The Ritual.

Overall, this is another fine horror novel whose minor flaws are overshadowed by its many manifest strengths. If you're anything like me, this is one you’ll remember for a long time afterwards.

Strange Story #20: House Of Leaves

Strange Story #20: House Of Leaves

Author: Mark Z. Danielewski

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say...

Most of the strange stories I've featured in this column to date have been short, controlled tales – paranoia and fear mounting to a single moment of horror. Whilst the best of these stories might imply a lot, they definitively state very little.

House Of Leaves is not that kind of story.

This is a huge novel (and one you must read in its physical version rather than as an ebook, as the photographs in this post will indicate) with multiple plots and sub-plots, typographical tricks, footnotes and diversions. It tells the story of ‘The Navidson Record’, a film by a renowned photographer about a very singular house.

The book takes the form of an academic treatment of the film, discussing its themes and veracity. This has apparently been written by Zampano, a blind man who dies in mysterious circumstances. His manuscript is recovered by a second character, Johnny Truant, who interprets the Zampano notes and The Navidson Record in his own way, as well as chronicling the breakdown he suffers whilst reading the material, despite the fact that he can find no evidence that the film even exists.

So the book is in effect one narrator annotating the notes of another narrator about a film neither can ever have seen (one doubting it is real, the other being blind) and that even if it does exist might just be a fake anyway. I think.

Added to this, the book is a labyrinth (and that word is chosen deliberately) of other stories, from Johnny’s tall-tales told to impress girls to historical accounts of people shipwrecked in the Arctic. The book also features seemingly never-ending lists (of architectural features, famous photographers, ghost stories etc.), mirror-writing, poems, and letters with a secret code. There are 'quotations' about the Navidson Record from people like Derrida, Camile Paglia, and Stephen King. There are a number of seemingly trivial mysteries that nevertheless prey on the mind: why is the word house (or any translation thereof) in a different colour & font to the rest of the text? Why is every reference to the Minotaur myth crossed through?

This book achieves ambiguity not through sparseness of detail but through a surfeit of it.

And there remains the fact that, despite the interruptions and longueurs, there is at the core of this book a truly frightening and original horror story. The Navidson Record starts with the Navidson family moving into a new house, and Navidson realising his house appears to be a fraction of an inch bigger on the inside than the outside: Lovecraft’s crazy geometry rewritten on a domestic scale. Soon after, a door appears in the house that wasn't there before, that appears to open onto a small, dusty corridor… which is clearly occupying the same physical space as the garden outside the house. Navidson, and later others, explore the corridor, and they soon realise the space behind the door is potentially huge (infinite?), and shifting and protean... and there might be something in that impossible space with them. The sheer impossibility of the house, initially represented by that small fraction of an inch, becomes something experienced on a far vaster scale. Added to this is the very human drama played out between Navidson and his wife Karen, who desperately wants her husband to stop exploring the house, and between Navidson and his estranged brother Tom. The book contains several moving moments of catharsis as well as it's brain-frying detail.

House Of Leaves seems to me a stunning achievement, a book that will become a true classic of the genre (despite the fact that no genre can really contain it). It meshes post-modernism with a strong knowledge of horror tropes, and comes up with something absolutely original. It contains enough intellectual stimulation to fuel a thousand post-graduate essays, but with enough twists and turns of the plot to turn it into an addictive page-turner too. Despite its size it’s compulsively readable, and re-readable – I've read it three times now and found new pleasures and confusions each time.

In fact, typing this, it occurs to me it's a love story, too.

Absolutely essential reading.

Review: The Little Stranger

A quick review of The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. I thought this was a stunning achievement in terms of character voice and point of view; in terms of period detail and depiction of a changing society; and in terms of its use of an unreliable narrator.

The book is set in post WW2 England, and the narrator is a local Doctor with self-confessed humble beginnings, who gradually becomes involved with the old-money family who live in Hundreds Hall. As in all classic ghost stories, the house is central to the tale, and Hundreds, with its boarded up wings and echoes of former glory, is a great haunted house.

The supernatural element is disturbing and creepy, and it only gradually dawns on the reader that there might be another explanation other than the rather obvious haunting initially suggested. From the reviews, some people seem to think the twists and ambiguities in the novel end here, but I disagree. There's ample evidence of multiple theories - that there is a specific spirit haunting the house; that someone living is psychically responsible; that someone living is responsible in a rather more mundane way; or that the house itself, like Hill House before it, is preying on each victim's weaknesses. There doesn't appear to me to be any definitive explanation (indeed several of the above could overlap) and foe me the book displays the same kind of eerie ambiguity as The Turn Of The Screw.

What frightens us most is what we don't know.

Big Bulky Horror Novels for Halloween

Halloween is an odd time of year, when people who never normally watch horror movies or read ghost stories seem to find an excuse to do so. The webpage of a national newspaper might discuss a short story by Robert Aickman, and a respectable broadcaster might devote an hour to an informed discussion of European horror films.

 

I'm probably guilty on this blog of discussing the more obscure aspects of horror fiction, at the expense of commercial books that a wider audience will have heard of. So in tribute to Halloween and the temporary mass celebration of all things scary, I've decided to do a post on my favourite BIG horror best-sellers. These were the kind of books that introduced me to the genre when I was a teenager and it’s unlikely I’d be reading Aickman & Co. if I’d not read the likes of King and Simmons first.

 

I've imposed some strict rules on my selections here: no tricksy post-modernism (sorry, House Of Leaves); no psychological ambiguity (bye bye Turn of The Screw and Hill House); nothing old (stop moaning,  Doctor Jekyll And Mister Hyde) and no short stories or novellas (adiós just about every weird, under-appreciated book I've ever featured here). Instead, these are the block-busters. The writers of cracking action scenes with unambiguously evil villains. At least three have been made into movies, and the other two should be.

 

I guess it’s obvious from the above that this list would include King, so I thought I might as well start with him. IT is probably my favourites of his horror novels, and it exemplifies the kind of book I'm talking about here: vast, with a sprawling cast of characters, and a ‘big bad’ who has been responsible for decades of fear in the Maine town (of course) of Derry. The story takes place across two timelines – the characters repeat scenes from their childhood as flawed and weaker adults… King’s handling of this, and the creepy effects associated with time repeating itself, are a highlight of the novel and really call into question those people who think he can’t write with any subtlety. (Just because the books I'm talking about here are big bulky blockbusters doesn't mean they’re big bulky dumb blockbusters.)

 

For me, Ghost Story is Straub’s best book by a country mile – forget the singular title, this book should really be called Ghost Stories, containing as it does multiple stories told by a group of old men know as the ‘Chowder Society’. Straub takes the Stephen King approach of using an American small town as a setting for his horrors, and as a microcosm of society as a whole, but this is distinctly his own style. As the story progresses it becomes clear that each of the individual ghosts and monsters are just facets of the real evil; that each of the separate stories being told, are in fact just elements of one story after all.

Probably the most ‘arty’ book in this list, and arguably not horror, being told as it is from the point of view of a monster. But there are bigger monsters in this tale than the vampire doing the talking, and the real horror may be the slow falling away of his humanity… I like this book for it’s lavish set pieces (the whole book is nothing more than a series of set pieces, really) and the darkly luxurious feel of the prose, particularly in its descriptions of night-time New Orleans and Paris. Maybe this was the start of the trend towards Twilight and everything bad associated with that, but here the vampires still have a decadent, almost nihilistic  edge. (Everything else I've read by Rice, including the sequels to this, I've not liked at all.)

 

An absolute whopper of a book, which has a premise that makes it sound like the worst tripe imaginable: ‘mind vampires’ have been controlling human affairs for decades. But this was back when Simmons was at the top of his game (by contrast his last book was one part plot to nine parts Tea Party ranting) and he plays the idea of mind vampires with a completely straight bat. They become almost the ultimate villain, responsible for humanity’s evils both big and small. And like all the best villains they are completely compelling. The odds seem ridiculously stacked against the human heroes and despite the simple good versus evil plot, the book has an air of desperation in places that makes it stand out.

 

The most recent book on the list and yet another one about vampires. I don’t know if Lindqvist has read Interview With The Vampire, but given it’s English-language ubiquity it at least seems likely he might have. One of the minor characters in that book might have been the inspiration for this one – a child vampire. A creature that has lived for centuries but still has the body of a kid. In some ways this is the darkest of the books in this list, with its setting of an 80s Swedish housing estate, and its background themes of addiction and child-abuse. In this setting the child-vampire is only partly horrific, and the tale of her relationship with a lonely schoolboy has a real emotional core, twisted and bleak, but there. The kind of book that gives best-sellers a good name.

Feel free to mention your own big bulky favourite horror novels in the comments...

Strange Stories #18: Objects in Dreams May be Closer Than They Appear by Lisa Tuttle

Strange Story #18: Objects In Dreams May Be Closer Than They Appear
Author: Lisa Tuttle
Anthologised In: The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012; House of Fear

I didn’t know why he felt the need to revisit the past like that...

Looking back through the sixteen ‘Strange Stories’ to date I noticed something disturbing the other day – not a single haunted house story…

Let’s rectify that with Lisa Tuttle’s thoroughly haunting Objects in Dreams May be Closer Than They Appear.

The most obvious way to define a haunted house would be to say it’s one that contains a ghost (or ghosts). But that’s a bit boringly literal, and I prefer to think of these stories are being ones where our dwellings, our homes - where we should feel at our safest - turn out to be some kind of trap. Houses are not the same as other things that we buy, and not just because of their price. We buy a certain kind of house because we want a certain kind of life. Because we can imagine a certain kind of life there.

I would have been happy to go on for months, thinks the narrator in this story, driving down to the West Country, looking at properties and imagining what our life might be like in this house or that... 

People talk about finding their ‘dream house’… and the one in Tuttle’s story might be just that. It is first glimpsed by a young couple house hunting – their dream house seen in a glimpse whilst they are driving. But despite hours of trying, and checking with the local estate agent, they can’t find the road, or any road, that leads to it. The house seems to remain like a mirage on the horizon.

There it was, so close it must be just beyond the next curve of the road, yet forever out of our reach. The faint curl of smoke from the chimney inspired another yearning tug...

They don't find a route to that house - to their dream, if you like. And the story is narrated from the vantage point of years later, after the breakup of their relationship in the thoroughly normal, non-dreamlike house that they did end up living in.

Years later they meet up - and Michael (her old husband) has found the house again... and found a route to it.

“You’re not talking about our house,” she says. Outwardly she has her misgivings about going to look for the house - not out of fear, but because she doesn't want to relive the past. But maybe some part of her has been dreaming all these years - "our house" she says.

And they do find a way to their ‘dream house’ from all those years ago, and foolishly enter. The trap springs shut, and it’s an utterly compelling and unnerving one which I won't spoil here. But it is note-perfect, Tuttle managing to make it both incredibly disturbing and a perfect demonstration of how old dreams can curdle and warp.

Next Time: Strange Stories #19:  The Beautiful Stranger by Shirley Jackson