Hell House by Richard Matheson

                 I’m not a horror writer, and while I am developing a growing appetite for the genre, I can’t say I’m much of a horror reader, either.  I took this course because I determined that the effective presentation of external conflict in any genre requires techniques at the foundation of a good horror story--namely, scare tactics.  A villain doesn’t carry much weight if they don’t instill fear in the reader, and the threats of death, pain, and sadness that we level at our protagonists have only as much impact as their execution enables.  Hell House vindicated my method of study, not so much by being scary (it had me going at a few points, I’ll admit) as through the feeling of triumph I was left with at the end.  Fear-based conflict has all kinds of capacity to amplify the heroic qualities of a story’s characters, and on that level, Hell House totally delivered.   

                One-sided fights go hand in hand with horror.  As soon as we get the sense that the victims of a monstrous force stand a decent chance of victory, the force ceases to be monstrous and the story ceases to be scary.  Right from the get-go, then, the implicit context of simply being a horror story primes us to anticipate the protagonists of Hell House being overmatched.  We already know that Barrett’s Reversor isn’t going to work; we already know that Florence’s compassion won’t save any souls.  We go into the story expecting to watch snakes eat mice, wondering whether any will be smart enough to escape, and that’s what makes it so much cooler when the mice pull off the win.  These characters are fighting tooth and nail--Florence bites through her hand to retain sanity; Barrett persists in assembling his machine amidst a constant stream of injury; Fischer overcomes an excessive addiction to moping--and the overwhelming sense of futility in it all elevates their struggles to impressive feats of heroism when the unification of their efforts winds up being enough to take the house down. 

                I might not have responded so well with this aspect of the story if Matheson had opted to trivialize his characters by burdening them with cartoonish weaknesses.  While the house ultimately preys on the vulnerabilities alluded to at the beginning--Barrett’s pompous overconfidence is his downfall; Florence is too caring for her own good--it’s only after the author has explored the strengths of each character with what read to me as sincerity.  Florence isn’t an airheaded fool, but a compassionate, intelligent medium whose strength of will is crucial to Fischer’s ability to reason through the house’s phenomena.  Barrett isn’t a willfully ignorant windbag, but a capable physicist who was pretty damn close to extinguishing the house’s powers.  The characters are flawed, definitely, but only enough to give value to their more impressive qualities.

                I know a lot of my classmates didn’t think Hell House was scary, and I agree that, yeah, a lot of the time it isn’t.  I’d argue, however, that through much of the novel it maintained a crucial element of any horror story--the overt sense of a dangerous, unbeatable threat--and that it used that element to pull off a more than satisfying finish.   

"The Haunting of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson

I can’t help but feel as though I’ve failed Shirley Jackson somehow.  When a story is so pointedly distinct from the expectations provided by its subject matter and so greatly revered (or so a brief amount of research tells me) by its target audience, I have to conclude that my complete disengagement with the material must be rooted in my own shortcomings as a reader.  Whether I’m defective or not, though, The Haunting of Hill House failed to hold my interest, and my slipshod analysis of what it is that Jackson was really trying to do here won’t be fun for any of us.  In lieu of that, here’s my breakdown of why I not only didn’t get into this story thoroughly enough to experience whatever emotional turn it was geared for, but why I’m not even all that interested in doing so.

I’ve got no problem with Jackson choosing to center the story around Eleanor’s reaction to Hill House rather than the manifestations within it.  Internal conflict is arguably more integral to storytelling than the external stuff, and I won’t hold a story to the promise implied by its title if the content is good enough.  No, my difficulty with Hill House was more a product of my never understanding what the conflict actually was.  It’s easy to point to issues Eleanor is trying to deal with--the death of her mother, her desire for friendship, the lack of control over her life--but I was rarely able to connect those conflicts to the particulars of any given scene.  Eleanor’s loneliness isn’t enough to justify the long, long stretches of banter exchanged between the core characters, and the quartet’s persistently whimsical attitude towards everything--not even a ghost at the door can stop them from dropping one-liners--made unclear to me what was actually at stake.  Characters went from being unnaturally friendly, to unnaturally critical, to unnaturally brave with a rhyme and reason that I couldn’t decipher, to the point that by the end of it I just stopped caring.

As noted, my confusion might not be Jackson’s fault.  She can’t control how perceptive her readers are, or how long their attention-spans might be.  What she can control, however, is how inclusive her story is to the reader, and I felt like I was being shut out of the story in a lot of respects.  I recognize that POV standards might not have been as stringent at the time of the novel’s publication as they are today (though I consider Hill House a decent example of why POV stability is important), but even discounting the inconstant head jumping, I rarely felt connected enough with Eleanor’s experience to sympathize with her on any level.  It might have been the regular use of telling over showing--Hill House is described as bad and awful and terrible as soon as we see it, even if descriptions demonstrating the point are a long time coming--and it might have been my inability to understand the characters’ behavior at any given time.  It’s rare that I nitpick technical details in my reviews of published work, but I really feel that the application of some basic storytelling principles--close POV, concrete details, showing over telling--could have done a lot to connect me to Eleanor and whatever story was trying to be told through her.

I would have preferred clearer conflict, harder details, and more accessible connections between the story’s events and the characters’ reactions to them.  Maybe I stumbled right past the point of the work, and to make such changes would have compromised Jackson’s whole endeavor, but at the end of the day I wasn’t entertained.  I was really unentertained, in fact, which damns the novel on the only scale that matters to me.