Ghostbusters

I was pretty psyched that something would finally force me to watch this movie, because it’s one of those iconic pieces of pop-culture that everyone knows about and I’ve always felt like I should really get around to seeing sometime. I went into it familiar with most of the imagery from its signature moments--the green ghost, the laser backpacks, the giant marshmallow man--and, perhaps more importantly, I was aware of the fondness with which it’s remembered. I’ve never heard a bad word spoken about this movie or anyone in it (I challenge you to find a single negative comment about Bill Murray on the internet; that shit just doesn’t exist). Even knowing the special effects of the eighties were gonna wind up a little underwhelming, its reputation as one of the big cinematic events of the decade had me pretty excited. Now that I’ve watched it, I’m happy to say: Yeah, it was pretty good.

None of it made me laugh, but none of it left me cringing at jokes that completely flopped, either, and that was with the comedic handicap of watching it solo. A lot of the humor was centered around Bill Murray being a jerk, and while that’s right up my alley when it comes to stuff I find funny, it just never quite did it for me. Maybe shows like Archer and Always Sunny have accustomed me to stronger doses of the watch-people-be-assholes drug. The goofier stuff, like nerds being awkward (haw!), hit home more often despite feeling kinda dated. Rick Moranis is awesome.

I thought the ghosts were handled pretty darn well. The movie does a solid job of steadily upping the tension without ever losing its lighthearted charm, and while the conflict seems to wind up having more to do with gods and demon-dogs than phantoms and hauntings, it maintains a deft balance of horror, action, and comedy right through to the end. The inclusion of a convoluted mythology to the whole affair felt a little at-odds with the tone of everything else, but it enabled that big spectacle at the end with the marshmallow man and the shaving cream ‘splosion, so whatevs. I flinched when the library ghost made a crazy face, I got spooked when hands popped out of Sigourney Weaver’s chair, and I had fun watching that green thing do considerably less damage to the hotel than Murray and his Ghostbusters. I liked it.

'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens

It’s tough to discern what can actually be learned from A Christmas Carol. The story’s over a hundred years old, comes in more variations than Monopoly, and gets viewed/read/experienced a half-dozen times by every person in the world before they’ve reached the fifth grade.  Trying to objectively examine what does and doesn’t work with it feels almost impossible, because our experience is inevitably colored by our childhood memories and the feeling that only a cynical asshole would bag on a tale so earnestly heartwarming and universally beloved. I don’t intend to take on the role of that asshole here--I felt just as warm and fuzzy during this read-through as I did when I was seven--but I am interested in whether the ridiculously over-the-top romanticism Dickens writes with would be considered as masterful were the story released today. I don’t think it would be, or should be, and that’s not a criticism of the story.

The staying power of A Christmas Carol is possibly the best argument around when it comes to challenging the role of moral complexity in storytelling. The emotional direction of each scene is so blatant, so forcibly thrust in the reader’s face, I imagine even Ayn Rand might find herself thinking “I don’t know, man. Doesn’t that seem kinda heavy-handed?” Scrooge, his nephew, his sister, the Cratchets--Dickens paints each of these characters in the boldest shades of black and white he can find on his palette, developing each of his moral conclusions by saddling positive and negative qualities accordingly. Some might argue that Scrooge, in the journey through his soul that spans the length of the book, adds some degree of moral nuance to the tale, but I’d disagree. He goes from all-bad in reality, to all-good in flashback, to all-bad in flashback, to all-good in reality; his shift to the dark side isn’t a Breaking Bad transition in value judgments, but a switch that gets flipped on and off as needed for the story. All of the characters function this way--not as individuals with desires, but as one-note personifications of whatever feeling Dickens wants to express through them.

And what the hell, it works. I think we read this story less like... well, a story, and more like a fairy tale, where it’s okay to express a big, loud moral through perfect heroes and hateful villains (the three-tiered plot construction certainly has the ring of a fairy tale, doesn’t it?). It’s the kind of story you read to a kid before bedtime to reassure them the world works a certain way, and to that end it’s successful. While you’re not thinking about how Scrooge couldn’t have afforded to pay for Tiny Tim’s medical care if he hadn’t spent his life accruing his vast fortune, you’re immersing yourself in a reality in which good and evil are plain as day and the right attitude is all it takes to live happily ever after. It’s good at what it does. Great at it.

                

We’ve set the bar higher since A Christmas Carol, though. It might seem laughable to say while we’re fresh past of the glory days of Twilight and Fifty Shades fandom, but I think storytelling is something that’s only gotten better with time. It has to, really. Discriminating readers demand depth and complexity of their fiction, and, having read and become jaded to most of the deep and complex stuff of the past, the demand for quality inevitably gets set higher and higher as time goes on. I think this is a good thing, even if it means that treasured works of the past wouldn’t hold up again if they had to surface anew. It doesn’t detract from the magic of A Christmas Carol to argue that we wouldn’t sing its praises so unanimously if it didn’t come with all the baggage it does. It just reminds us how magical some of the stuff we have today really is.

Scary Dairy

Patrolled by police during the day and closed to the public at night, Scary Dairy is about as haunted as anything can get in the golden hills of Camarillo, CA. Only a splintered framework remains of the wooden farmhouse, but the graffiti-riddled dairy itself is still largely intact. The farm, adjacent to the Camarillo State Mental Hospital, was originally constructed as a means for the patients to develop work experience and provide additional income for the hospital. While dark rumors about the nature of the initial labor and the murderous patients involved are common among highschoolers, much of the farm’s current notoriety stems from its regular use as a hideout for gang activity.

Word on the street is that the doctors’ treatment of the patients was largely unethical, involving forced labor, lobotomies, electric shock therapy, and a relative lack of confinement for murderous individuals while situated only miles away from residential areas. The hospital was closed down due to controversy over its methods and location, and after attempts to readapt the area into a prison, then a school, the buildings were abandoned. Some claim that the Eagles’ “Hotel California” references Scary Dairy and the adjoining hospital, though there’s no real evidence to support the notion. Paranormal occurrences reported to have taken place involve the sensing of negative presences, the rapid depletion of electronic batteries, and the sighting of purple plasma energies.

My friends and I used to airsoft at Scary Dairy when I was in high school, and a few of them were under the notion that the dairy had also served as a slaughterhouse back in the day. I haven’t found any info that suggests that, but I like the idea, fiction-wise, of so much blood, violence, and depravity culminating in one place. Were I to incorporate it into a story, I think I’d opt for the Shining/Hill House method of developing the location into an antagonist. Something involving victims going insane and viewing the others like cattle needing to be slaughtered. Or something to do with milk. There’s a lot to work with.

Paranormal Activity

I’ve never known anyone who thought Paranormal Activity was “all right.”  It’s either another innovative testament to our fear of the unknown or a boring, soulless attempt by Hollywood to capitalize on cheap production costs. “Oh, doors slamming shut are all it takes to scare you?” As someone who falls into the receptive camp, I’d like to confirm that they totally are, because in that moment we’ve got no idea what’s on the other side.

There’s gotta be something to the hot-cold split in the reactions to this movie. Those who hate it tend to claim it’s poorly made and those who defend it insist the detractors “didn’t understand it” (which I guess could be said of any argument over artistic preferences), but the all or nothing dichotomy really has me thinking that an individual’s reaction to this movie is somewhat independent of both the film’s quality and the viewer’s critical merit.

Some stuff just isn’t for everyone. Some people’s taste buds just line up in a way that they don’t like a certain flavor. Where a million different variables create a more gradual distribution of enjoyment for most movies, the sharp cutoff for receptiveness to this particular movie indicates that it comes down to how affected you are by just a few distinctive elements. How scared you are of a door moving back and forth in the night has a lot more to do with your own subconscious ideas about danger and the unknown than it does with the ability of the person presenting it to you. Granted, it’s a storyteller’s job to figure out which concepts will press the right emotional buttons, but in the case of Paranormal Activity, the filmmakers did just that. The people whose fear nerves got all tingly when an invisible figure began pounding on a slammed door can attest to it.

This isn’t an argument for artistic quality being determined by popular opinion. This is a guess about this movie involving elements of horror that simply don’t resonate with everyone, based on the fact that the people who don’t like it tend to feel that none of it was even slightly scary. I’ve felt some fear watching horror movies I didn’t like. I’ve felt some fear watching horror movies I ultimately didn’t think of as scary. If you came away from Paranormal Activity completely unfazed by a single part of it, then, I’ve gotta ask: Do you think that you experienced Paranormal as it was meant to be experienced and simply saw through shoddy craftsmanship, or that there’s a chance that the movie hinged on an avenue of horror that just doesn’t click for you?

Elaine Mercado's 'Grave's End'

               Well, it was better than Amityville. I know, I know--dead horse, doesn’t tell us much, yadda yadda. If I didn’t come into this one with a bunch of no-fun-at-all skepticism keeping me in check, though, there’s a good chance I would’ve bought into it. It isn’t just that the writing is better than Anson’s (It is. It’s a lot better, even if it still felt like there was a gap between Mercado and a polished storyteller), but that the entities being drawn up here simply feel more believable. For the most part. While there was definitely a turning point at which the spirits of Grave’s End began reading a little too clichéd or nonsensical to take seriously (looking at you, weepy bride and ghost farts), the believability factor remained relatively intact throughout, thanks in no small part to the tedium and anticlimax that washed over the text like a cold shower.

                Fiction usually delivers. It’s kind of its thing. When it comes to fiction we can legitimately expect that justice will be served, that emotions will define events, and that big, loud, meaningful things will happen. We’re so accustomed to stories working this way, I think, that we’ve come to associate the opposite of these qualities with reality. Compared against fiction, reality is slow and boring and rarely delivers. You’re a lot more likely to fall in love by meeting someone through mutual friends and talking than by realizing the lab partner you’ve hated for so long actually gives your life all the beautiful things you never knew you were missing. When I argued that The Lovely Bones invested too much in establishing a sense of reality, I viewed the tease of dangling Harvey’s potential arrest in front of the reader, as well as the subsequent dashing of our hopes, as an attempt to show how real it was by painting itself in very “anti-fiction” colors. This isn’t to say that I don’t approve of the technique; George R.R. Martin’s got a similar thing going in his Song of Ice and Fire series, and I enjoy the hell out of that. On the contrary, I think it’s extraordinarily useful when applied with some tact, and it’s what elevates the sense of authenticity in Grave’s End’s hauntings over those of Amityville.

                Grave’s End is largely just a bunch of waiting. Waiting for the ghost antics to escalate, waiting for the psychics to arrive, waiting for Elaine’s marriage to fall apart. Its events stretch out over the painfully slow span of twelve years, and it ends with their first proactive attempt to manage the situation through a fairly uneventful cleansing. The conflict arc plateaus after the first forty pages and drops off effortlessly in the last five or so, and I can believe the hell out of that. I thought it was kind of boring, and I probably wouldn’t read it again unless I had to, but it definitely has the ring of a true story. Whether Mercado captured that feeling by accident, by legitimately telling the truth, or through conscious effort, her book has a quality that I think most fiction writers are constantly striving for. If we can maintain that level of truthiness and still work in all the juicy perks that make fiction worthwhile in the first place, we pretty much win the game.

The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson

               It’s hard to think of anything worth saying about The Amityville Horror. The work’s notoriety stems largely from the hoax that surrounded its release, as well as... Oh, wait. No. That’s all it’s got going for it. The quality of the writing is among the worst I’ve seen in published material, fiction or non-fiction, and the fact that it’s reached a level of popularity so far beyond anything the story itself deserves can only be a testament to the power of... gullibility? Hope? You tell me. Part of me wants to give it kudos for managing to generate controversy and investigation in the first place. Anson and the Lutzes must have struck some kind of nerve to ever get that far, right? I wonder, though, if they’re not simply the first people with the gall to lie that boldly and in that particular way. Whatever the case, they managed to convince some people for some amount of time, and given how heavily fiction relies on blurring the line between reality and make-believe, there must be something worth exploring in that.

                Even under its initial guise as the recounting of a real event, Amityville presented itself as a story rather than a purely informative work. More importantly, it presented itself as a story intended to scare. Anson’s always sure to pepper an exclamation point or two on top of anything we’re supposed to be astonished or frightened by, and every now and again he indulges his pronoun-starved prose with the poetic flourish of a writer setting a scene. It touts itself as an examination of events, but its identity as a horror story is unmistakable, and for the sake of developing an idea I’m going to assume that it’s a successful one. I’m assuming that the people who read it when it first came out were frightened, and that anyone who’s read this far in my essay is on board with my stance that the story’s pretty crap on a technical level, because doing so allows us to examine a pretty cool dimension of fiction. Amityville’s success as a horror novel in spite of its poor artistic merit illustrates how significant the complementary relationship between a story’s emotional potency and its grounding in reality actually is.

                I complained that The Lovely Bones invested too heavily in establishing a strong sense of reality, and I argued against Professor Johnson’s essay on the inclusion of reality translating to better storytelling, but Amityville’s got me re-examining both of those points. All fiction attempts to produce an emotional reaction from its audience, and because artists have succeeded in doing so through mediums as distant from reality as cartoons and claymation, I’ve never considered maintaining plausibility as being that integral to the artistic process. Something worth keeping an eye on, maybe, but nothing to get hung up over. I think I was wrong. Our reactiveness to the events in a work of fiction is based not only on the value judgments being triggered but on the extent to which the author has tricked us into believing that what we’re reading is true. If the triggered values make up a story's length and width, the sense of reality is what constitutes its depth, multiplying the impact by making it not just something that resonates with us, but by virtue of being more "real" something that threatens to genuinely affect us.

                For the initial readers of The Amityville Horror, then, the shoddy “width” and “length” were experienced in conjunction with incredible “depth”. By simply adding another lie to the long string of lies that make up any work of fiction--by claiming that it was real--Anson could write all the clichés and crappy dialogue he wanted and still impact his audience. I can only imagine how scared they might have been had this one-time-only opportunity fallen into the hands of a more capable author.  

Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones"

                 I’m always afraid of treating popular material unfairly in the name of insincere anti-conformity, so I do my best to give mainstream stuff every possible chance.  How “mainstream” Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones actually is might be debatable, but I’ll take the fact that my mom knows about it to mean it’s crossed some noteworthy threshold in popularity. Imagine my relief to find that I really dug the story, that I found the prose to be easily the strongest of any of the works we’ve covered so far, realizing a depth and poetic grace that Shirley Jackson, in my opinion, attempted and failed in Hill House. Imagine my disappointment to find that, after a powerful opening and a workable middle, Sebold apparently threw in the towel and opted to let her story peter out into a dull series of slice-of-life snapshots that everyone claims literary fiction is snobbishly committed to. I felt deflated by the time things rolled to a slow, yawning stop, and after looking back at the pages that I did enjoy, I realized that I should have expected it all along.

                The story is about grief and overcoming loss more than it is about seeking justice for a murder. I get that. That’s no excuse for spending the first half of the book toying with the reader’s legitimate expectation that events will develop into a conflict between George Harvey and the Salmons, only to look back innocently at the end of it all and say, “Oh, you were expecting resolution? What ever gave you that idea?” If poetic justice was never on the table, why show us so much of Harvey when a view of the Salmon family and the teenage hipsters would have been enough to explore the eventual focus? The argument that “it’s about dealing with the fallout of murder and Harvey’s one of the people dealing with it” doesn’t really hold, because nothing ever changes about the man. Every passage involving him only goes on to explain the depths of his evil and some off-putting features of his childhood, right up until the moment he’s killed by an icicle (‘anticlimactic’ doesn’t do it justice). It was a tease. Look how much you want him dead but nope-sorry-kids-life-is-tough-sometimes. At least when No Country for Old Men pulled this stunt it had the decency to make injustice the overt theme of the story.

                Harvey’s static nature underlies the bigger problem I had, which is that weight is never actually attributed to any of the characters’ decisions. Everything that happens is a product of coincidence, happenstance, or spontaneous insight, and the path each character takes is portrayed not as a series of crossroads but as arbitrary reactions to events they never influence. Jack just knows that Harvey did it. Ruth locked eyes with Susie once and remained obsessed ever after. While much of the novel seems to be establishing realism by denying any connection between value judgments and tangible consequences--Harvey does terrible things but he never suffers consequences; Abigail runs away from her family but nothing changes in her relationship with Jack--it saves its romanticism for absurdly hollow gestures like the Ray/Susie sex scene at the end. Their morally questionable intercourse is among the closest things we get to a climax (no pun intended, it was the best word for the sentence), and it doesn’t show us anything about either character we didn’t already know. None of the decisions did, really. Everything we needed to know was already told to us through Sebold’s beautiful, elegant narrative commentary, sparing the reader the burden of deciding for themselves what to make of the story’s events.

The Others

                 I can only think of a single other horror movie (and I don’t want to name it, at the risk of spoiling the ending) where the final twist is that the characters were never in any real danger, and with both films I walked away feeling like I had watched a drama rather than a horror. I didn’t think either of the movies were particularly bad, but I didn’t think they were particularly engaging either, and my brain really recoils at the thought of watching them a second time. By all accounts, I should like The Others--the characters are solid, the idea is original, and the atmosphere is top notch. I just wasn’t scared (‘cept the little girl/old lady bit), and the fact that nothing was ever at stake sorta lets the air out of what middling interest I did have.

                Even before I caught on to the twist (which happened around midway through the film) I never had the feeling that the unseen forces in the house were a threat to the Stewarts. This might actually be a testament to the skill of the filmmakers, matching the ‘supernatural’ occurrences to the actions of the defensive, confused individuals on the other side so accurately that the absence of malevolence shone through, but it’s hard to view the absence of horror in a horror story as anything but a handicap. I want to say that this is a product of our never seeing harm befall anyone at any point; we never get the “meat shot”, as Arnzen would say, to drive home the fact that the threatening force means business. Problem with that claim, though, is that a ton of horror eschews early demonstrations of the evil power in favor of working its way up to something big in the finale.  Paranormal Activity is one of ‘em, off the top of my head. Still, most of these stories do wind up throwing us a few bones at least midway through, and I tend not to like the ones that don’t (Hill House comes to mind). Maybe it has to do with attention spans, and varies from person-to-person.

                 I dunno. I don’t think The Others is a bad movie. Honest.  I just got kinda bored with it.

Stephen King's "The Shining"

           Stephen King has always read to me as an author whose strengths outweigh his weaknesses, like a fighter with lousy form who still delivers a solid enough knockout punch to earn his place in the ring.  I enjoyed The Stand but thought it ended poorly.  I was chilled by the finale of Rage but thought a lot of his characterizations were a hard sell.  In general, King’s skill with scene-building, character depth, and intensely emotive narration (as well as what has to be a gargantuan memory bank of brand names and colloquialisms) do battle with, and ultimately prevail over, his tendency towards overlong plots and prose that’s decidedly, almost deliberately, lacking in finesse.  The Shining wasn’t much different.  He puts us squarely in the place and minds of his characters, wallops us with some incredible, high-intensity scenes, and then more or less shrugs off the reader’s need for emotional closure.  It’s powerful, fun, and a little bit empty when it’s all said and done.  That’s what I expected and what I got. 

           From what I’ve read of King’s thoughts on writing, he wouldn’t consider the “weaknesses” I’ve outlined to be worth losing any sleep over.  Where other writers might get hung up on weaving a concrete detail into a scene without disrupting the flow of the action, King doesn’t bat an eye.  Dude just comes right out and says whatever he wants to say.  The chance that a lengthy paragraph of description or dialogue might weigh a scene down never pushes him to pass up an opportunity to bedazzle the reader just that much more.  Given that I’d seen enough clips of (though never actually seen) the film to have a general notion of how it all shakes out, it’s hard to say what was really “necessary” for the buildup of tension for this particular story, but amidst generous descriptions of the Overlook Hotel and a few too many scenes going over similar points (Danny is psychic, Jack has violent/indulgent urges, Winnifred is worried), The Shining did seem to take its time getting off the ground.

           And this shouldn’t be read as a criticism of the author’s style.  For any points I could make about a clunky dialogue tag here or there, the guy produces some furiously gripping work.  He can afford not to worry about how tight his plotting is because he more than makes up for it elsewhere.  For those of us not blessed with the high-speed (possibly corrupted) supercomputer that is Stephen King’s brain, though, reading his work from the perspective of a learning student can feel an awful lot like watching a circus performer in awe.  “Boy, that’s impressive!  I sure couldn’t do that, and I don’t particularly want to learn.”

"Ghost Story" by Peter Straub

         The idea of antagonistic species who hate on humanity for being inferior has always struck me as kind of funny.  It seems akin to a bunch of humans saying, “I hate dogs! They’re so stupid and predictable they don’t even deserve to live!” before going on to torture and kill anything with the audacity to wag its tail.  Just seems kinda arbitrary.  That being said, the ‘things’ in Peter Straub’s Ghost Story really were mysterious and intriguing as all get out through a solid majority of the novel, which is no small feat in story just shy of 500 pages.  While there’s definitely some depth to the journey experienced by the many protagonists as they overcome their internal struggles to take down the external ones, that topic hews a little close to my last essay’s, so my analysis of Ghost Story is going to be reined in to scrutinizing the presentation of its creatures.  More specifically, I’m arguing that the story is at its most frightening (though not necessarily its most entertaining) before we know the motive of the entities haunting the town of Milburn.

         Reflections on the unknown being scarier than anything we can perceive are overdone in this brand of discussion, but that’s probably because the truth in them is a basic principle of so many elements of horror.  I’m not exactly breaking new ground when I claim that an increase in information lessens the fright factor, so it’s important to clarify exactly what kind of information becomes ‘too much’.  For me, the turning point was the scene in which Gregory kills Mrs. Barnes, gloating to Peter of his origins and nature.  The scene doesn’t lay out a motive for the Bates brothers, nor does it give away information amounting to more obvious fear killers (like the fact that you can kill them the same way you can kill everything else).  What it does do is display a sense of awareness in the antagonists, signaling that we aren’t dealing with the purposeless hate machines the text insisted we were, but entities with feelings and ideas--ideas which can be broken down, examined, and criticized.

          This is crucial, I think, because evil ideas walk a tricky line between being stupid and being wrong, neither one of which is particularly frightening.  The times at which I was the most frightened by and interested in Anna and Co. were those in which their actions couldn’t be tethered to any particular motive.  Why did Anna spend so much time with Don only to disappear and kill his brother?  Why would these powerful beings be interested in killing a group of old men?  Why was Gregory so damn mean?  These questions are at their scariest when they’re unanswered, even if the story clarifies ahead of time that the questions cannot be answered (how many horror stories define their spirits as the physical manifestion of an emotion?).  The introduction of these characters in all their initial mystery--Gregory as a hateful force of nature, Anna as a whimsical harbinger of death--represents, to me, the peak of their intrigue and menace.  Their actions cannot given a “why” without giving up the vulnerable, vulnerable ideas, meaning that frightening characters can never really be ‘characters’. 

          There’s a point in Stephen King’s The Stand where Satan (or a Satan stand-in, I forget) tells one of the main characters that he’ll spare his life so long as he kneels down and worships him, at which point the character bursts out laughing.  I assume he would have laughed at the antagonists of this novel, also, as the concept of beings with such immense power and knowledge being coupled with the pettiness of a twelve-year-old girl is downright absurd.  This corner of the horror genre--big evil baddies with genuine motives--might be something that just can’t work.  Evil ideas just aren’t that scary.  They’re generally just stupid, and it’s only the possibility that anyone could act on them that’s worth fearing.

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.