A-Z 2021 J: We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson, 1962)

If you read American fiction, you have probably encountered Shirley Jackson's writing at some point, even if you don't remember her by name.  She's especially known currently as the author of The Haunting of Hill House (thanks, Netflix), but she first made her name rather earlier than that, with a 1948 short story in the New Yorker.  In that story, a small New England farming town is engaging in an annual tradition.  It's quite a festive occasion, except...

If by some chance you haven't read that story (and believe me, if you've read it, you know exactly what story that is, just from that one sentence), do please take a moment to follow that link.  I'm not going anywhere.

...

...I know, right?

So, why do I bring this up?  Well...  I think I could safely argue that We Have Always Lived in the Castle takes place in, if not the same small town, one very nearby, perhaps just a few miles farther down the highway from Haunting's Hillsdale.

This is a story told to us by the very neurotic tomboy Merricat (Mary Katherine Blackwood), about how she and her older sister, Constance, came to live alone in their family home.  Merricat is... Something.  She's eighteen years old, but in a similar fashion to Nell in Haunting, she seems somehow emotionally stunted, younger than she actually is.  She's obsessed with mushrooms and other forest foraging, buries treasures as protective amulets around the house, and has a very hard time with breaking rules that determine what she is and isn't allowed to do.  I'm going to be honest, with her intense reliance on schedules and ritual, not to mention the insinuations by the most obvious "villain" of the piece (not that he ever actually states it outright) that she belongs in an institution , I read her as being somewhere on the autism spectrum, though that's never stated in the text (not that the "spectrum" was even an idea at the time).  That or she's actively a budding Baba Yaga sort; she does specifically say early on that she prefers her library books to be fairy tales.

Merricat opens right up with laying out for the reader that she has Constance, and all the rest of her family is dead (though this isn't completely accurate), along with making it rapidly clear that the people of the village all hate her family, mercilessly teasing her whenever she goes into town to get groceries and library books.  Constance, who is rather mentally broken in other ways, unable to handle other people for the most part and rarely willing to leave their manor house any further than the edge of her vegetable garden, is acting as the caretaker for the family, primarily for their sick Uncle Julian, the only other member of the household, who is wheelchair-bound, half-senile, and obsessed with trying to recreate the night that, according to the schoolyard rhymes that continually appear, Connie poisoned the whole family with arsenic in the sugar.  After all, Connie could never be that subtle, and if she was the poisoner, why didn't she do something earlier in the day, like the rarebit at lunch?

This mystery floats through the whole book.  Julian survived the poisoning because he only took a very small amount of sugar on his blackberries for dessert, Constance doesn't especially like sweet things so didn't take any, and Merricat had gotten in trouble for something and was sent to bed without dinner, so wasn't present.  It didn't help that Constance, before help arrived, had washed out the sugar bowl, "because there was a spider in it."  She really doesn't like spiders.

There are a few visitors, now and then, people who were friends of Merricat's mother and insist on inviting themselves to tea in order to try and coax Constance out of her fear of other people and leaving the safe space that is their home, but Merricat is distrustful of all of them.  Anything that might change the routines that she relies on; she gets a chill when Constance even mentions the idea of venturing beyond the garden's edge.

Into Merricat's orderly world comes Charles Blackwood, a cousin from a part of the family that completely cut themselves off when Constance was arrested (though later acquitted) for the mass murder.  Charles very quickly insinuates himself into the household, using Constance as his route of choice, and begins efforts to convince her that his way of addressing everything is better, that it would all be better if he and Constance were the only ones in the house, that Uncle Julian should be in a hospital with trained nurses and Merricat should... he never says it outright, but it's clear what he thinks.

Merricat is distrustful of Charles from the start, and Julian seems to agree in his lucid moments.  This seems to be borne out as the interloper seems to have no compunctions about making himself completely at home, making use of her father's valuables (after noting the value if they were sold, more than anything else), and continually finding Merricat's buried talismans, none of which are given anything less than an utter rage-filled rant that drives her from the house repeatedly.

Everything comes to a head when a fire is "accidentally" started by Merricat, thanks to the newspapers that Charles leaves strewn everywhere and a tobacco pipe left smoldering in his room, at which the entire town becomes involved in a mass riot and looting event.  And here's where we see just how bad the village actually is; when everyone in town follows the fire engine to watch the biggest excitement they'v'e seen in a long time, the crowd includes calls to just let it all burn down, and laments that the girls should have been inside, rather than having been allowed to run for safety.  Even when the fire is put out, it doesn't stop them from, en masse, storming into the manor and starting to just destroy everything they can get their hands on; the only thing that stops them, in fact, is the discovery of a dead body.

So, here's the thing...  After Merricat and Constance they start putting their world back together, the townsfolk, for the most part, seem to realize they made a huge mistake, and it becomes clear that they're going to be trying to make up for it for a very long time.  They know they went beyond the pale, they feel remorse for the way they've treated the Blackwood girls.  It's unclear how long they'll be continuing to try to make up for it, but it's perfectly clear that everyone in the village knows exactly what their mistakes were and are going to apologize specifically.  They know they did wrong, even if it took a complete catastrophe to realize it.

Shirley Jackson has a reputation for being a horror writer, but I think labeling her that way does her a severe injustice.  Her themes are, for the most part, extremely mundane and human; what she writes about isn't as innocuous as a monster or a ghost.  Rather, what her books reveal is the weakness of the human mind under stress, the fragility of peaceful existence, and the ease in which humans are capable of inhuman acts.



It seems that there's been a movie made of this recently, with Crispin Glover as Julian.  Which...  Yeah, I can see Crispin Glover fitting in rather well in any Shirley Jackson project, really; he just fits in this kind of creepy plotline.  It's even on Netflix.  Kind of makes me want to see if it's closer to The Haunting (1963), The Haunting (1999), or The Haunting of Hill House (2018) in terms of how well it works with the source material.

The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson, 1959)

 ...well, that was certainly an unexpected ending.

So, I watched Netflix's adaptation (for lack of a better term) of The Haunting of Hill House back in October/November.  Enjoyed it a lot, thought some of the directing decisions were brilliant, but also knew pretty quickly that it was going way off-script.  Years and years ago I remember having seen the 1990s film version, and thinking it was... less than great... but not really having a way of articulating why.  However, it was pretty clearly a haunted house movie.  The Netflix version spends very little time with the adult characters in the titular house, which is a big change from the previous plot.  Now, though, having read the book, I think I can explain what's so wrong with the 1999 version, and the trailer I linked there does a very good job of spelling it out exactly.

"There once was a house. A bright happy home. Something bad happened. Now it sits all alone."

Yeaaaaaah, no.  Hill House is not at all supposed to be a happy home.  Or have a villainous scientist doctor going on, or crazy Winchester House-like bricked-up doors, or...  any of the weird stuff that you see in that trailer.  But then, that's what you get with a 1990s action film director doing a haunted house thriller, right?

Let's instead look at what Shirley Jackson had to say about the house, hmm?  A passage that she not only starts the book with, but also ends with.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.  Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.  Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

That does not sound like a bright happy home, to me.  And indeed, the house seems, by the descriptions given in the book, to have been purposefully designed to be unsettling to those inhabiting it.

The first thing that's really worth noting, though, is that at no time do we actually see a ghost in the text of the book.  Suspenseful scares, sure, but never anything visible.  Instead, it's a series of ways that the house is just subtly deranged.  Now, that may be anthropomorphizing, to suggest that the house itself suffers some mental instability, but... well, Mrs. Jackson helpfully established that in the second sentence of the book, and the house itself is almost as much a character as any of the leads.

Our primary protagonist in the book, and presumably the 1960s film version (the only one of the three adaptations I haven't yet seen; I wanted to read the book first, as it's apparently also the only one of the three that actually follows the book at all), is Eleanor Vance.  Those who have seen the Netflix version may know Eleanor, Nell, as the youngest of the Crain children, who was the most affected by the strangeness of the house, and who spends most of the series, well... dead.  Other than the first two chapters (about six pages which serve to give some general background for the characters as a whole, and set up why they all find themselves together in Hill House) and the last chapter (half a page giving a very trim epilogue of 'Here's what happened after all that just went down,' we spend the entire book in Eleanor's head.  Very much so, in fact; every little flight of fancy that her mind wanders down is spelled out for us.  She lives a very active fantasy life, perhaps understandable as she has spent her entire adult life, up until three months prior to the events of the novel, taking care of her invalid mother, who was apparently equal parts needy and abusive; she now lives on a cot at her sister's house, generally aimless, unemployed, and seemingly still subject to a certain amount of verbal abuse.

Eleanor is joined in our insane manor by Theodora (just Theodora), an artist with a generally lackadaisical view of cultural norms or even generally planning ahead; Luke Sanderson, a character somewhat in the vein of Shakespeare's Prince Hal in that he's got all the advantages being in a rich family brings, but somehow manages to be a bit of a roguish sort nonetheless, and who stands to eventually inherit Hill House; and the three have been brought together by the invitation of Dr. John Montague, a psychologist by training who is trying to bring some scientific credibility to the study of the supernatural, primarily through a method of 'Get some people who have been even tentatively associated in the past with some kind of paranormal occurrence into the house, and have everyone take notes while we stay here for the summer.'

Note: Luke is there because the family that owns Hill House wants a member of the family there; Theo is apparently clairvoyant or something but it's never actually something that plays into the narrative; and Eleanor's house was apparently bombarded with rocks for three days when she was a child, for no apparent reason, though she believes it to have been a prank perpetrated by the neighbors.

Eleanor is a likeable character, though shows signs early on of having a rather less than firm grasp on right and wrong, or even adult life.  In order to participate in Dr. Montague's research, she has to steal her sister's car (telling herself that it's OK because "it's half hers," but also not bothering to actually tell anyone where she's going), and consistently lies to everyone she meets once she's started her drive down the road about who she is and what she has waiting for her back at home.  It's only in the final pages of the book that anyone finds out the truth about her life, and by then... well, the house has done its damage.

It's very well established from the early pages that, in the small nearby community of Hillsdale, everyone knows precisely what the house is, and knows to stay away from it.  We only see the little community long enough for Eleanor to stop in, buy a cup of coffee, and have a very brief exchange asking about how often they get visitors (never).  The groundskeeper at the gate to the house is surly, wary of letting anyone in, and once she talks her way past the gate and gets up the driveway, her first impression of the house itself is, well...

The house was vile.  She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.

If only she had listened... well, then the novel wouldn't have happened at all, but such is the way of things; many horror and suspense novels wouldn't happen if the characters listened to their gut.

What we come to find out is that the house was designed by Hugh Crain as a sort of...  experiment, almost, in making things purposefully unsettling.  There are no right angles in the house; everything is off by just fractions of a degree, perhaps one or two at most.  The end result ends up being that doors like to shut themselves if not propped open, rooms feel just a little bit off, and it's easy to think that the house is differently shaped than it actually is by looking out a window.  This isn't helped by a floor layout in which there are a great many rooms with no windows to the outside, halls that seem to go just a little too far, a kitchen with three doors out onto the veranda...  But not any secret passages or completely hidden rooms, we're assured.

The house is relatively benign by day.  Mrs. Dudley, who takes care of the house and cooks for the guests, is very curt, not talkative at all, and very open about how she does not stay there after dark, under any circumstances.  In fact, it's stated early on that leaving the house at night is a poor idea; there's a history of people not actually making it down the driveway if they attempt it.

The first part of the novel, then, is taken up with the characters getting to know each other, exploring the house, and Eleanor forming a close friendship with Theo.  This becomes a sort of safety mechanism for Eleanor, particularly after the strange events begin at night.  Banging on doors, doorknobs jiggling, and so on, with sounds coming from too high up on the door for any of the people present to make them.  You know, haunted house stuff.

This starts to change, however, after the house starts directly going after Eleanor.  Or maybe not.  It's hard to say what's really going on.  The first directed occurence is a chalked message along the length of an entire hallway, HELP ELEANOR COME HOME.  Whispered voices, seemingly only heard by Eleanor.  A scene where Theo's room is vandalized with what seems to all those present to have been blood, the message HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR on the wall in the red paint-that-isn't-paint.  This particular incident is perhaps the most perplexing in the novel; all four of the primary cast see the way the room has been left, and the room is locked up afterward, to preserve the evidence for Dr. Montague to later sketch for the book he plans to write about all this, but later, when it's opened up again by Dr. Montague's wife, who shows up in the last part of the novel to "helpfully" offer her skills as a medium, everything has been returned to the way it was, as if nothing had happened.

The vandalism in Theo's room drives a wedge between the two women, and Eleanor spends the second half of the book gradually becoming more and more paranoid, convinced that everyone is talking about her when she's not around, that they all know she's a fraud, that none of them are actually her friends at all.  This builds to a point where she has a complete psychotic break, in a scene that was very much channeled in the Netflix series during Nell's return to the house, though with a very different endpoint.

The biggest thing that stands out in the novel, really, is that most of the events could, theoretically, be explained on a purely scientific basis.  The chalk message could be Luke pranking everyone (though he denies it).  The banging on doors could be the house settling.  The shadows and unsettling feeling, well, that's explained by the unsettling architecture of the house itself.  Eleanor becoming convinced that she belongs in Hill House, that it's her home now and she won't leave, she's going to stay here forever...  she's got a less than coherent grasp of reality, as it were.

Theo's room, though, remains the biggest question.  What really happened there, and how did it get returned to the way it was?  The characters establish early on a rule that nobody should go anywhere alone, and indeed, until Eleanor's breakdown, nobody goes anywhere on their own.

All the same, there is never any indication that there's a real ghost in Hill House.  Mrs. Montague may argue that her planchette told her there's a nun bricked up in the walls, or a defrocked monk, but nobody pays her claims any credence.  Rather, the implication given by the text is that it is the house itself that is doing the haunting.  A mass hallucination seems somewhat unlikely, given the detail of the episode in Theo's room, but seems the only other potential explanation, short of the house being, well...

not sane.

Summer Reading 2015 (3): Horrorstör (Grady Hendrix, 2014)

Summer Reading 2015, #3: ‘A book based entirely on its cover’, Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix.

So, I have no clue why Amazon threw this into my ‘you might like’ list, apparently based solely on my having read something by Mark Danielewski.  It has very little to do with anything Danielewski has written, other than the haunted house aspect and the smattering of extradiegetic documents provided every few chapters.  That said, the cover grabbed my attention immediately, and I almost ordered it on the spot (only holding back due to the public library having a copy). It was a fun read, if rather unapologetically living in the ‘guilty pleasure’ category.  Fine literature this is not.

The one thing that helped me the most in reading this was having actually, finally, *been* to an IKEA store earlier this year.  I’ve been to one of the things exactly once, but that was enough to make sure that every description made perfect sense to me.  After all, that’s the core concept at work here: a haunted IKEA ORSK, positioned as an American knock-off of the big blue box.  Every box is ticked: two-story atrium with escalators to take you inside, upstairs showrooms to let you see what the ORSK-furnished lifestyle is like, incomprehensible names for everything in the place (featuring plenty of characters not on English-language keyboards), impulse-buy space downstairs, followed by the fifty-foot-ceiling flatpack warehouse... 

But this book is wearing its nature on its sleeve; IKEA is name-checked before the first chapter is even over, and the narrator herself isn’t afraid to compare her employer with the Swedish original and find ORSK wanting.  But that’s really not what the book is about, and it doesn’t hesitate to jump straight into its central premise: IKEA and similar stores with ‘guided experiences’ lull consumers into a nigh-hypnotic state of shopping trance, such that your will to resist the merchandise in front of you is reduced.  This ends up being a recurring theme throughout the book, even after it first toys with being a somewhat generic ‘unseen intruder’ thriller (someone is in here at night, vandalizing the place!), then turns into a full-blown haunted house horror novel.

This particular ORSK, you see, was inadvertently built atop the former site of an 1830s prison of the Panopticon model, wardened by a deranged psychiatrist who was convinced that literally working his inmates to the point of physical breakdown in sisyphean menial tasks was the proper way to shape them into obedient members of society.  This becomes a problem when an ill-advised seance in the ORSK store (note: this book contains a blatant idiot ball plot, in that none of the people involved stop to consider whether this is a good idea, given the other events up to that point) results in said psychiatrist’s spirit being given a body to inhabit... and the spirits of all his dead inmates rising up as his personal army, intent on helping drag the hapless wageslaves into the same hellish afterlife they’ve been trapped within.

Of course, as a satire, the book also isn’t afraid to pepper the whole thing with plenty of jabs at corporate culture and cults-of-personality, a general theme being that the characters have been targetted by the warden because they are, in some way, deficient and need to be ‘fixed’ through his sadistic, cult-like methods.

As an aside, the writer is clearly not the sort of person you want to be locked in an IKEA with at night.  Some of the implements bodged together from flat-packed parts in the second half of the book are decidedly unsettling, especially when paired with the chapter openings, which feature line-art drawings of IKEA-esque furniture and catalog descriptions... which change to show the very devices being used on the characters during the later part of the book.

Which then, I guess, brings me to the design itself.  The book is consciously shaped and sized to appear like an IKEA catalog, featuring a store map on the inside front cover, and the pages in the immediate front and back are designed to look like company copy that you’d find in such a catalog.  The colophon is even hidden in a page that is designed to look like an order form.

I absolutely tore through this book.  From when I first got my hands on it at the library through to when I finished reading it, it was less than 30 hours.  But then, that’s just a sign of a good thriller: it grabs you, and doesn’t let you put it down until the last page is over.

Next in the reading order will be 'A trilogy’ (+1 +2, huh, didn’t realize there was a fifth in here) : Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy.