Colquitt does not just put on her sun-hat when she goes out to do the garden; she puts on her Mexican sun-hat. She is justly proud of her job, but the reader may feel a bit more uneasy about her serene confidence in her own looks: "I have what I want and do not need the adulation of very young men, even though, I modestly admit, there have been some around my agency who have offered it." We know that she looks good in tight jeans; Colquitt herself helpfully points this out. We have the feeling that if the book had been written a year or two later, Colquitt would be pointing out that she looks good in her Calvin Klein jeans. The point of all this is that she's not a character most people will be able to hope for easily, and whether or not her personal tics help or hinder in the book's steady, downturning funnel toward disaster is something that the reader will have to decide for herself or himself.
Equally problematic is the book's dialogue. At one point Colquitt hugs the newly arrived Anita Sheehan and tells her, "Welcome to the neighborhood once again, Anita Sheehan.
Because you're a whole new lady and one I like immensely, and I hope you're going to be very, very happy here." I don't quibble with the sentiment; I just wonder if people, even in the South, really talk like this.
Let's say this: the major problem with The House Next Door is the muddiness of character development. A lesser problem is one of actual execution-a problem that crops up mostly in the dialogue, as the narration is adequate and the imagery often oddly beautiful. But as a gothic, the book succeeds admirably.
Now let me suggest that, in addition to being a Southern gothic novel, Anne Rivers Siddons's The House Next Door , whatever its shortcomings in terms of characterization or execution, succeeds on far more important ground; it is a prime example of what Irving Malin calls "the new American gothic"-so is Straub's Ghost Story , for that matter, although Straub seems much more clearly aware of the species of fish he has netted (the clearest indication of this is his use of the Narcissus myth and the spooky use of the lethal mirror).
John G. Park employed Malin's idea of the new American gothic in an article for Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction . * Park's article is on Shirley Jackson's novel The Sundial , but what he says about that book is equally applicable to a whole slew of American ghost and horror stories, including several of my own. Here is Malin's "list of ingredients" for the modern gothic, as explained by Park in his article.
First, a microcosm serves as the arena where universal forces collide. In the case of the Siddons book, the house next door serves as this microcosm.
Second, the gothic house functions as an image of authoritarianism, of imprisonment, or of "confining narcissism." By narcissism, Park and Malin seem to mean a growing obsession with one's own problems; a turning inward instead of a growing outward. The new American gothic provides a closed loop of character, and in what might be termed a psychological pathetic fallacy, the physical surroundings often mimic the inwardturning of the characters themselves-as they do in The Sundial . **
This is an exciting, even fundamental change in the intent of the gothic. Once upon a time the Bad Place was seen by critics as symbolic of the womb-a primarily sexual symbol which perhaps allowed the gothic to become a safe way of talking about sexual fears. Park and Malin are suggesting that the new American gothic, created primarily in the twenty or so years since Shirley Jackson published The Haunting of Hill House , uses the Bad Place to symbolize sexual interests and fear of sex but interest in the self and fear of the self . . . and if anyone should ever ask you why there has been such a bulge in the popularity of horror fiction and horror films over the last five years or so, you might point out to your questioner that the rise of the horror film in the seventies and early eighties and the rise of such things as Rolfing, primal screaming, and hot-tubbing run pretty much in tandem, and that most of the really popular examples of the horror genre, from The Exorcist to Cronenberg's They Came from Within , are fine examples of the new American gothic, where we have, instead of a symbolic womb, a symbolic mirror.
*The article is "Waiting for the End: Shirley Jackson's The Sundial ," by John G. Park, Critique, Vol. XIX, No. 3, 1978.
**Or in The Shining , which was written with The Sundial very much in mind. In The Shining , the characters are snowbound and isolated in an old hotel miles from any help. Their world has shrunk and turned inward; the Overlook Hotel becomes the microcosm where universal forces collide, and the inner weather mimics the outer weather. Critics of Stanley Kubrick's film version would do well to remember that it was these elements, consciously or unconsciously, which Kubrick chose to accentuate.
This may sound like a lot of academic bullshit, but it's really not. The purpose of horror fiction is not only to explore taboo lands but to confirm our own good feelings about the status quo by showing us extravagant visions of what the alternative might be. Like the scariest bad dreams, the good creepshow often does its work by turning the status quo inside out-what scares us the most about Mr. Hyde, perhaps, is the fact that he was a part of Dr. Jekyll all along. And in an American society that has become more and more entranced by the cult of me-ism, it should not be surprising that the horror genre has turned more and more to trying to show us a reflection we won't like-our own.
While looking at The House Next Door , we find we can lay the Tarot card of the Ghost aside-there are no ghosts per se in the house which is owned by the Harralsons, the Sheehans, and the Greenes. The card which seems to fit better here is the card that always seems to come up when we deal with narcissism: the card of the Werewolf. More traditional werewolf stories almost always-knowingly or unknowingly-mimic the classic story of Narcissus; in the Lon Chaney, Jr., version, we observe Chaney observing himself in the Ever-Popular Pool of Water as he undergoes the transformation back from monster to Larry Talbot. We see the exact same scene occur in the original TV film of The Incredible Hulk as the Hulk returns to his David Banner form. In Hammer's Curse of the Werewolf , the scene is repeated yet again, only this time it's Oliver Reed who's watching himself undergo the change.
The real problem with the house next door, we see, is that it changes people into the very things they most abhor. The real secret of the house next door is that it is a dressing-room for werewolves.
"Nearly all the characters of the new American gothic are narcissistic," Park sums up, "in one form or another, weaklings who try to read their own preoccupations into reality." This sums up Colquitt Kennedy, I think; and it also sums up Eleanor, the protagonist of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House ; and Eleanor Vance is surely the finest character to come out of this new American gothic tradition.
"The inspiration to write a ghost story," Lenemaja Friedman writes in her study of Jackson's work, "came to Miss Jackson . . . as she was reading a book about a group of nineteenth-century psychic researchers who rented a haunted house in order to study it and record their impressions of what they had seen and heard for the purpose of presenting a treatise to the Society for Psychic Research. As she recalls: 'They thought they were being terribly scientific and proving all kinds of things, and yet the story that kept coming through their dry reports was not at all the story of a haunted house, it was the story of several earnest, I believe misguided, certainly determined people, with their differing motivations and backgrounds.' The story so excited her that she could hardly wait to create her own haunted house and her own people to study it.
"Shortly thereafter, she states, on a trip to New York, she saw at the 125th Street station, a grotesque house-one so evil-looking, one that made such a somber impression, that she had nightmares about it long afterward. In response to her curiosity, a New York friend investigated and found that the house, intact from the front, was merely a shell since a fire had gutted the structure . . . . In the meantime, she was searching newspapers, magazines, and books for pictures of suitably hauntedlooking houses; and at last she discovered a magazine picture of a house that seemed just right. It looked very much like the hideous building she had seen in New York: `. . . it had the same air of disease and decay, and if ever a house looked like a candidate for a ghost, it was this one.' The picture identified the house as being in a California town; consequently, hoping her mother in California might be able to acquire some information about the house, she wrote asking for help. As it happened, her mother was not only familiar with the house but provided the startling information that Miss Jackson's great-grandfather had built it." *
Heh-heh-heh, as the Old Witch used to say.
On its simplest level, Hill House follows the plan of those Psychic Society investigators of whom Miss Jackson had read: it is a tale of four ghost-busters who gather in a house of ill repute. It recounts their adventures there, and culminates with a scary, mystifying climax. The ghost-busters-Eleanor, Theo, and Luke-have come together under the auspices of one Dr.
Montague, an anthropologist whose hobby is investigating psychic phenomena. Luke, a young wise-guy type of fellow (memorably played by Russ Tamblyn in Robert Wise's sensitive film version of the book), is there as a representative of the owner, his aunt; he regards the whole thing as a lark . . . at least at first.
Eleanor and Theo have been invited for different reasons. Montague has combed the back files of several psychic societies, and has sent invitations to a fairly large number of people who have been involved with "abnormal" events in the past-the invitations, of course, suggest that these "special" people might enjoy summering with Montague at Hill House. Eleanor and Theo are the only two to respond, each for her own reasons. Theo, who has demonstrated a fairly convincing ability with the Rhine cards, is on the outs with her current lover (in the film, Theo-played by Claire Bloom-is presented as a lesbian with a letch for Eleanor; in Jackson's novel there is the barest whiff that Theo's sexual preferences may not be 100 percent AC).
*From Shirley Jackson , by Lenemaja Friedman (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975), p. 121. Ms. Friedman quotes directly from Shirley Jackson's account of how the book came to be; Miss Jackson's account was published in an article entitled "Experience and Fiction.”