" "Angie what?" "Don't know." "Why doesn't anybody ever play with her?" The boy squinted at him, cocking his head; then, deciding he could be trusted, leaned forward charmingly, cupped his hands beside his mouth to tell a dark secret. "Because she's awful." Another theme which runs through both novelsa very Henry Jamesian themeis the idea that ghosts, in the end, adopt the motivations and perhaps the very souls of those who behold them. If they are malevolent, their malevolence comes from us. Even in their terror, Straub's characters recognize the kinship. In their appearance, his ghosts, like the ghosts James, Wharton, and M. R. James conjure up, are Freudian. Only in their final exorcism do Straub's ghosts become truly inhumanemissaries from the world of "outside evil." When Julia asks Mona the name of the turtlekilling little girl, Mona gives back her own name ("Doolya," she says). And when, in Ghost Story, Don Wanderley tries to ascertain who this eerie little girl is, this disquieting exchange follows "Okay, let's try again," he said. "What are you?" For the first time since he had taken her into the car, she really smiled. It was a transformation, but not of a kind to make him feel easier; she did not look any less adult. "You know," she said. He insisted. "What are you?" She smiled all through her amazing response. "I am you." "No. I am me. You are you." "I am you." Ghost Story is at first glance an extravagant mishmash of every horror and gothic convention ever yarned in all those Bpictures we've just finished talking about. There are animal mutilations. There's demon possession (Gregory Bate, a secondary villain, battens upon his younger sister, who escapes, and his younger brother . . . who doesn't). There's vampirism, ghoulishness (in the literal sense of that word; Gregory dines on his victims after they're dead), and werewolvery of a most singular and frightening sort. Yet all of these fearsome legends are really only the outer shell of the novel's real heart, where there stands a woman who may be Eva Galli . . . or Alma Mobley . . . or Anna Mostyn . . . or possibly a little girl in a dirty pink dress whose name, supposedly, is Angie Maule. What are you? Don asks. I am you, she responds. And that is where the heartbeat of this extraordinary book seems the strongest. What is the ghost, after all, that it should frighten us so, but our own face? When we observe it we become like Narcissus, who was so struck by the beauty of his own reflection that he lost his life. We fear the Ghost for much the same reason we fear the Werewolf it is the deep part of us that need not be bound by piffling Apollonian restrictions. It can walk through walls, disappear, speak in the voices of strangers. It is the Dionysian part of us . . . but it is still us. Straub seems aware that he is carrying a basket dangerously overloaded with horrors, and turns the fact splendidly to his own advantage. The characters themselves feel that they have entered a horror story; the protangonist, Don Wanderley, is a writer of horror stories, and within the town of Milburn, New York, which becomes the world of this novel, there is the smaller world of Clark Mulligan's Rialto Theater, which is showing a horrormovie festival during the book's progress a microcosm within the macrocosm. In one of the book's key scenes Gregory Bate throws one of the book's good guys, young Peter Barnes, through the movie screen while Night of the Living Dead is showing in the empty theater. The town of Milburn has become snowed in and overrun with the living dead, and at this point Barnes is literally thrown into the movie. It shouldn't work; it should be overt and cute. But Straub's firm prose maker it work. It preserves Straub's hallofmirrors approach (three of the book's epigrams are Straub's own free rendering of the Narcissus story), which keeps us constantly aware that the face looking out of all those mirrors is also the face looking in; the book suggests we need ghost stories because we, in fact, are the ghosts. Is this really such a difficult or paradoxical idea when you consider how short our lives are in a wider lifescheme where redwoods live two thousand years and the Galapagos sea turtles may live for a thousand? Most of Ghost Story's power comes from the fact that of the four archetypes we have discussed, the Ghost is the most potent. The concept of the Ghost is to the good novel of the supernatural what the concept of the Mississippi is to Twain's Huckleberry Finnreally more than symbol or archetype, it is a major part of that mythpool in which we all must bathe. "Don't you want to hear about the manifestations of the different spirits in her?" the younger priest asks the older before they go up to Regan MacNeil before the final confrontation in The Exorcist. He begins to enumerate them, and Father Merrin cuts him off curtly "There is only one." And although Ghost Story clanks and roars with the trappings of vampirism and werewolvery and flesheating ghouls, there is really only AlmaAnnaAnnVeronica . . . and little Angie Maule. She is described by Don Wanderley as a shapechanger (what the Indians called a manitou), but even this is a branch rather than the taproot; all of these manifestations are like the up cards in a hand of stud poker. When we turn over the hole card, the one that makes the hand, we find the central card of our Tarot hand the Ghost. We know that ghosts aren't inherently evilin fact, most of us have heard or read of a case or cases where ghosts have been rather helpful; the shade who told Auntie Clarissa not to take that plane or who warned Grampy Vic to go home fast because the house was catching on fire. My mother told me that after suffering a near fatal heart attack, a close friend of hers had a visit from Jesus Christ in his hospital room. Jesus At one point, while under strain, Don gives a long, rambling lecture to an undergraduate class on the subject of Stephen Crane. In the course of his talk he describes The Red Badge of Courage as "a great ghost story in which the ghost never appears." Considering the book's moody approach to the subjects of cowardice and bravery, it is an oddly apt description of that novel. just opened the door of Emil's I.C. room and asked him how he was doing. Emil allowed as how he was afraid he was a goner, and asked Jesus if He had come to take him. "Not yet," Jesus said, leaning casually against the door. "You've got another six years in you. Relax." He then left. Emil recovered. That was in 1953; I heard the story from my mother around 1957. Emil died in 1959six years after his heart attack. I have even had some truckle with "good ghosts" in my own work; near the end of The Stand, Nick Andros, a character who has been killed earlier in an explosion, returns to tell halfwitted but goodhearted Tom Cullen how to care for the novel's hero, Stu Redman, after Stu has fallen gravely ill with pneumonia. But for the purposes of the horror novel the ghosts must be evil, and as a result we find ourselves back in a familiar place examining the Apollonian Dionysian conflict and watching for the mutant. In Ghost Story, Don Wanderley is summoned by four old men who call themselves the Chowder Society. Don's uncle, the fifth member, died of an apparent heart attack the year before while attending a party thrown for the mysterious actress AnnVeronica Moore. As with all good gothics, a summary of the plot beyond this basic situation would be unfairnot because the veteran reader of this material will find much that is new in the plot (it would be surprising if he, she, or we did, in light of Straub's intention to fuse as many of the classic ghost story elements as possible), but because a bare summary of any gothic makes the book look absurdly complex and labored. Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood. Straub succeeds winningly at this, and the novel's machinery runs well (although it is extremely loud machinery; as already pointed out, that is also one of the great attractions of the gothicit's PRETTY GODDAM LOUD!). The writing itself is beautifully tuned and balanced. The bare situation is enough to delineate the conflict in Ghost Story; in its way it is as clearly a conflict between the Apollonian and Dionysian as Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and its moral stance, like that of most horror fiction, is firmly reactionary. Its politics are the politics of the four old men who make up the Chowder SocietySears James and John Jaffrey are staunch Republicans, Lewis Benedikt owns what amounts to a medieval fiefdom in the woods, and while we are told that Ricky Hawthorne was at one time a socialist, he may be the only socialist in history who is so entranced by new ties that he feels an urge, we are told, to wear them to bed. All of these menas well as Don Wanderley and young Peter Barnesare perceived by Straub as beings of courage and love and generosity (and as Straub himself has pointed out in a later letter to me, none of these qualities run counter to the idea of reactionism; in fact, they way well define it). In contrast, the female revenant (all of Straub's evil ghosts are female) is cold and destructive, living only for revenge. When Don makes love to this creature in its Alma Mobley incarnation, he touches her in the night and feels "a shock of concentrated feeling, a shock of revulsionas though I had touched a slug." And during a weekend spent with her, Don wakes up and sees Alma standing at the window and looking blankly out at the fog. He asks her if anything is wrong, and she replies. At first he persuades himself that her reply has been "I saw a ghost." A later truth forces him to admit she may have said "I am a ghost." A final act of memory retrieval convinces him that she has said something far more telling "You are a ghost." The battle for Milburn, New Yorkand for the lives of the last three members of the Chowder Societycommences. The lines are clearly and simply drawn for all the complexities of plot and the novel's shifting voices. We have three old men, one young man, and one teenage boy watching for the mutant. The mutant arrives. In the end, a victor emerges. This is standard enough stuff. What distinguishes itwhat "brings it up"is Straub's mirroring effect. Which Alma is the real Alma? Which evil is the real evil? As previously noted, it is usually easy to divide horror novels in another waythose that deal with "inside evil" (as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and those that deal with "outside" or predestinate evil (as in Dracula). But occasionally a book comes along where it is impossible to discover exactly where that line is. The Haunting of Hill House is such a book; Ghost Story is another. A great many writers who have attempted the horror story have also realized that it is exactly this blurring about where the evil is coming from that differentiates the good or the merely effective from the great, but realization and execution are two different things, and in attempting to produce the paradox, most succeed only in producing a muddle . . . . Lovers Living, Lovers Dead by Richard Lutz is one example. This is a case where you either hit the target deadbang or miss it altogether. Straub hits it. "I really wanted to expand things much more than I ever had before," Straub says. "I wanted to work on a large canvas. 'Salem's Lot showed me how to do this without getting lost among a lot of minor characters. Besides the large canvas, I also wanted a certain largeness of effect . . . I had been imbued with the notion that horror stories are best when they are ambiguous and low key and restrained. Reading [ 'Salem's Lot ], I realized that idea was selfdefeating. Horror stories were best when they were big and gaudy, when the natural operatic quality in them was let loose. So part of the 'expansion' was an expansion of effectI wanted to work up to big climaxes, create more tension than I ever had, build in big big scares. What all this means is that my ambition was geared up very high. Very much on my mind was doing something which would be very literary, and at the same time take on every kind of ghost situation I could think of. Also I wanted to play around with reality, to make the characters confused about what was actually real. So I built in situations in which they feel they are 1.) acting out roles in a book; 2.) watching a film; 3.) hallucinating; 4. ) dreaming; 5.) transported into a private fantasy.  This kind of thing, I think, is what our kind of book can do very well, what it is naturally suited to do. The material is sort of naturally absurd and unbelievable, and therefore suits a narrative in which the characters are bounced around a whole set of situations, some of which they know rationally to be false. And it seemed fitting to me that this kind of plot would emerge from a group of men telling storiesit was selfreferring, which always pleases me very deeply in novels. If the structure had a relationship to the events, the book has more resonance." He offers a final anecdote about writing the book "There was one very happy accident . . . . Just when I was going to start the second part, two Jehovah's Witnesses showed up on the doorstep, and I bought three or four pamphlets from them. One . . . had a headline about Dr. Rabbitfootthis was for a story written by a trombonist named Trummy Young, who once played with Louis Armstrong. Dr. Rabbitfoot was a minstrel trombonist he saw as a child. So I immediately fastened on the name, and started Book Two with the character." In the course of the novel, young Peter Barnes is picked up either by Alma Mobley or another socalled "nightwatcher" while hitching a ride. In this shape, the supernatural creature is a small, tubby man in a blue cara Jehovah's Witness. He gives Peter a copy of The Watchtower, which is forgotten by the reader in the explosive course of events over the next forty pages or so. Straub has not forgotten, though. Later, after telling his story to Don Wanderley, Peter is able to produce the pamphlet the Jehovah's Witness has given him. The headline reads DR. RABBITFOOT LED ME TO SIN. One wonders if this was the headline of the actual copy of The Watchtower which the Jehovah's Witness sold to Straub in his London home as he worked out the first draft of Ghost Story. The best of these occurs when Lewis Benedikt goes to his death. He sees a bedroom door formed by an interlocking spray of pine needles while hunting in the woods. He goes through the door and into a deadly fantasyland. 3 Let us move now from ghosts to the natural (or unnatural, if you prefer) habitat of ghosts the haunted house. There are hauntedhouse stories beyond numbering, most of them not very good ( The Cellar, by Richard Laymon, is one example of the less successful breed). But this little subgenre has also produced a number of excellent books. I'll not credit the haunted house as a genuine card in the Tarot hand of the supernatural myth, but I will suggest that we might widen our field of enquiry a bit and find that we have discovered another of those springs which feed the mythpool. For want of a better name, we might call this particular archetype the Bad Place, a term which encompasses much more than the fallendown house at the end of Maple Street with the weedy lawn, the broken windows, and the moldering FOR SALE sign. It is neither my purpose nor my place here to discuss my own work, but readers of it will know that I've dealt with the archetype of the Bad Place at least twice, once obliquely (in 'Salem's Lot) and once directly (in The Shining). My interest in the subject began when a friend and I took it into our heads to explore the local "haunted house"a decrepit manse on the Deep Cut Road in my home town of Durham, Maine. This place, in the manner of deserted dwellings, was called after the name of the last residents. So in town it was just the Marsten House. This ramshackle abode stood on a hill high enough to overlook a good part of our section of towna section known as Methodist Corners. It was full of fascinating junkmedicine bottles with no labels which still had odd and vile smelling liquids in them, stacks of moldy magazines (JAPS COME OUT OF THEIR RATHOLES ON IWO! proclaimed the blurb on one yellowed issue of Argosy), a piano with at least twentyfive dead keys, paintings of longdead people whose eyes seemed to follow you, rusty silverware, a few pieces of furniture. The door was locked and there was a No TRESPASSING sign nailed to it (so old and faded it was barely legible), but this did not stop us; such signs rarely stop selfrespecting tenyearolds. We simply went in through an unlocked window. After having explored the downstairs thoroughly (and ascertained to our satisfaction that the oldfashioned sulphur matches we had found in the kitchen would no longer light but only produce a foul smell), we went upstairs. Unknown to us, my brother and cousin, two and four years older than my friend and I, had crept in after us. As the two of us poked through the upstairs bedrooms, they began to play horrible, jagged chords on the piano down in the living room. My buddy and I screamed and clutched each otherfor a moment the terror was complete. Then we heard those two dorks laughing downstairs and we grinned at each other shamefacedly. Nothing really of which to be afraid; just a couple of older boys scaring the old Irish bejaysus out of a couple of younger ones. No, nothing really of which to be afraid, but I don't recall that we ever returned there. Certainly not after dark. There might have been . . . things. And that was not even a really Bad Place. Years later I read a speculative article which suggested that socalled "haunted houses" might actually be psychic batteries, absorbing the emotions that had been spent there, absorbing them much as a car battery will store an electric charge. Thus, the article went on, the psychic phenomena we call "hauntings" might really be a kind of paranormal movie showthe broadcasting back of old voices and images which might be parts of old events. And the fact that many haunted houses are shunned and get the reputation of being Bad Places might be due to the fact that the strongest emotions are the primitive onesrage and hate and fear. I did not accept the ideas in this article as gospel truthit seems to me that the writer who deals with psychic phenomena in his or her fiction has a responsibility to deal with such phenomena respectfully but not in a state of utter, worshipful beliefbut I did find the idea interesting, both for the idea itself and because it suggested a vague but intriguing referent in my own experience that the past is a ghost which haunts our present lives constantly. And with my rigorous Methodist upbringing, I began to wonder if the haunted house could not be turned into a kind of symbol of unexpiated sin . . . an idea which turned out to be pivotal in the novel The Shining. I guess I liked the idea itselfas divorced from any symbolism or moral referencebecause it's always been difficult for me to understand why the dead would want to hang around old deserted houses, clanking chains and groaning spectrally to frighten the passerby . . . if they could go elsewhere. It sounds like a drag to me. The theory suggested that the inhabitants might indeed have gone on, leaving only a psychic residue behind. But even so (as Kenneth Patchen says), that did not rule out the possibility that the residue might be extremely harmful, as leadbased paint can be harmful to children who eat flakes of it years after it has been applied. My experience in the Marsten House with my friend crosspatched with this article and with a third elementteaching Stoker's Draculacreate the fictional Marsten House, which stands overlooking the little town of Jerusalem's Lot from its eminence not far from the Harmony Hill Cemetery. But 'Salem's Lot is a book about vampires, not hauntings; the Marsten House is really only a curlicue, the gothic equivalent of an appendix. It was there, but it wasn't doing much except lending atmosphere (it becomes a little more important in Tobe Hooper's TVfilm version, but its major function still seems to be to stand up there on that hill and look broody). So I went back to the houseaspsychicbattery idea and tried to write a story in which that concept would take center stage. The Shining is set in the apotheosis of the Bad Place not a haunted house but a haunted hotel, with a different "real" horror movie playing in almost every one of its guest room and suites. I needn't point out that the list of possible Bad Places does not begin with haunted houses and end with haunted hotels; there have been horror stories written about haunted railroad stations, automobiles, meadows, office buildings. The list is endless, and probably all of it goes back to the caveman who had to move out of his hole in the rock because he heard what sounded like voices back there in the shadows. Whether they were actual voices or the voices of the wind is a question we still ask ourselves on dark nights. I want to talk here about two stories dealing with the archetype of the Bad Place, one good, one great. As it happens, both deal with haunted houses. Fair enough, I think; haunted cars and railway stations are nasty, but your house is the place where you're supposed to be able to unbutton your armor and put your shield away. Our homes are the places where we allow ourselves the ultimate vulnerability they are the places where we take off our clothes and go to sleep with no guard on watch (except perhaps for those ever more popular drones of modern society, the smokedetector and the burglar alarm). Robert Frost said home is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in. The old aphorisms say that home is where the heart is, there's no place like home, that a heap of lovin' can make a house a home. We are abjured to keep the home fires burning, and when fighter pilots finish their missions they radio that they are "coming home." And even if you are a stranger in a strange land, you can usually find a restaurant that will temporarily assuage your homesickness as well as your hunger with a big plate of homecooked home fries. It doesn't hurt to emphasize again that horror fiction is a cold touch in the midst of the familiar, and good horror fiction applies this cold touch with sudden, unexpected pressure. When we go home and shoot the bolt on the door, we like to think we're locking trouble out. The good horror story about the Bad Place whispers that we are not locking the world out; we are locking ourselves in . . . with them. Both of these tales adhere quite stringently to the conventional hauntedhouse formula; we are allowed to see a chain of hauntings, working together to reinforce the concept of the house as a Bad Place. One might even say that the truest definition of the haunted house would be "a house with an unsavory history." The author must do more than simply bring on a repertory company of ghosts, complete with clanking chains, doors that bang open or shut in the middle of the night, and strange noises in the attic or the cellar (the attic's especially good for a bit of low, throbbing terrorwhen was the last time you explored yours with a candle during a power failure while a strong autumn wind blew outside?); the hauntedhouse tale demands a historical context. Both The House Next Door, by Anne Rivers Siddons (1978), and The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (1959) , provide this historical context. Jackson establishes it immediately in the first paragraph of her novel, stating her tale's argument in lovely, dreamlike prose 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. I think there are few if any descriptive passages in the English language that are any finer than this; it is the sort of quiet epiphany every writer hopes for words that somehow transcend words, words which add up to a total greater than the sum of the parts. Analysis of such a paragraph is a mean and shoddy trick, and should almost always be left to college and university professors, those lepidopterists of literature who, when they see a lovely butterfly, feel that they should immediately run into the field with a net, catch it, kill it with a drop of chloroform, and mount it on a white board and put it in a glass case, where it will still be beautiful . . . and just as dead as horseshit. Having said that, let us analyze this paragraph a bit. I promise not to kill it or mount it, however; I have neither the skill nor the inclination (but show me any graduate thesis in the field of English American lit, and I will show you a mess of dead butterflies, most of them killed messily and mounted inexpertly). We'll just stun it for a moment or two and then let it fly on. All I really want to do is point out how many things this single paragraph does. It begins by suggesting that Hill House is a live organism; tells us that this live organism does not exist under conditions of absolute reality; that because (although here I should add that I may be making an induction Mrs. Jackson did not intend) it does not dream, it is not sane. The paragraph tells us how long its history has been, immediately establishing that historical context that is so important to the hauntedhouse story, and it concludes by telling us that something walks in the rooms and halls of Hill House. All of this in two sentences. Jackson introduces an even more unsettling idea by implication. She suggests that Hill House looks all right on the surface. It is not the creepy old Marsten place from 'Salem's Lot with its boardedup windows, mangy roof, and peeling walls. It's not the tumbledown brooding place at the ends of all those deadend streets, those places where children throw rocks by daylight and fear to venture after dark. Hill House is looking pretty good. But then, Norman Bates was looking pretty good, too, at least on the surface. There are no drafts in Hill House, but it (and those foolish enough to go there, we presume) does not exist under conditions of absolute reality; therefore, it does not dream; therefore, it is not sane. And, apparently, it kills. If Shirley Jackson presents us with a historya sort of supernatural provenanceas a starting point, then Anne Rivers Siddons gives us the provenance itself. The House Next Door is a novel only in terms of its firstperson narrator, Colquitt Kennedy, who lives with her husband, Walter, next to the haunted house. We see Their lives and their way of thinking change as a result of their proximity to the house, and the novel establishes itself, finally, when Colquitt and Walter feel impelled to "step into the story." This happens quite satisfyingly in the book's closing fifty pages, but during much of the book Colquitt and Walter are very much sideline characters. The book is compartmentalized into three longish sections, and each is really a story in itself. We are given the story of the Harralsons, the Sheehans, and the Greenes, and we see the house next door mainly through their experiences. In other words, while The Haunting of Hill House provides us with a supernatural provenancethe bride whose carriage overturned, killing her seconds before she was to get her first glimpse of Hill House, for examplemerely as background stuff, The House Next Door could have been subtitled "The Making of a Haunted House." This approach works well for Ms. Siddons, who does not write prose with the beautiful simplicity of Mrs. Jackson, but who nevertheless acquits herself well and honorably here. The book is well planned and brilliantly cast ("People like us don't appear in People magazine," the first sentence of the book reads, and Colquitt goes on to tell us just how she and her husband, two private people, ended up not only in People magazine, but ostracized by their neighbors, hated by city realtors, and ready to burn the house next door to the ground). This is no gothic manse covered with drifting tatters of fog off the moor; there are no battlements, no moats, not even a widow's walk . . . . Whoever heard of such things in suburban Atlanta, anyway? When the story opens, the haunted house hasn't even been built. Colquitt and Walter live in a rich and comfortable section of suburban Atlanta. The machinery of social intercourse in this suburba suburb of a New South city where many of the Old South virtues still hold, Colquitt tells usis smoothly running and almost silent, well oiled with u.m.c. money. Next to their home is a wooded lot which has never been developed because of the difficult topography. Enter Kim Dougherty, young hotshot architect; he builds a contemporary home on the lot that fits the land like a glove. In fact . . . it looks almost alive. Colquitee writes of her first look at the house plans I drew my breath at it. It was magnificent. I do not as a rule care for contemporary architecture, [but] . . This house was different. It commanded you, somehow, yet soothed you. It grew out of the penciled earth like an elemental spirit that had lain, locked and yearning for the light, through endless deeps of time, waiting to be released . . . . I could hardly imagine the hands and machinery that would form it. I thought of something that had started with a seed, put down deep roots, grown in the sun and rains of many years into the upper air. In the sketches, at least, the woods pressed untouched around it like companions. The creek enfolded its mass and seemed to nourish its roots. It lookedinevitable. Events follow in ordained fashion. Dionysian change is coming to this Apollonian suburb where hitherto there has been a place for everything and everything is in its place. That night, when Colquitt hears an owl hooting in the woodlot where Dougherty's house will soon go up, she finds herself tying a knot in the corner of her bedsheet to ward off bad luck, as her grandmother did. Dougherty is building the house for a young couple, the Harralsons (but he would have been just as happy building it for Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, he tells the Kennedys over drinks; it's the house that interests him, not the owners). Buddy Harralson is an upandcoming young lawyer. His littlegirlChiOmegaJuniorLeaguer wife, hideocomically known as Pie (as in Punkin Pie, her daddy's nickname), loses first her baby to the house in a miscarriage which occurs there when she's four months pregnant, then her dog, and finally, on the evening of her housewarming, everything else. Exit Harralsons, enter Sheehans. Buck and his wife, Anita, are trying to recover from the loss of their only child, who went down in a flaming helicopter while serving in Vietnam. Anita, who is recovering from a mental breakdown as a result of the loss (which dovetails a little too neatly with the loss of her father and brother years before in a similar accident), begins to see movies of her son's horrible death on the television in the house. A neighbor who is helping out also catches part of this lethal film. Other stuff happens . . . there is a climax . . . and exit Sheehans. Then, last but hardly least in terms of the grand guignol, comes the Greenes. If all this sounds familiar, it comes as no surprise to either of us. The House Next Door is a frame story, the sort of thing one likes to speculate, that Chaucer might have done if he had written for Weird Tales.


It is a form of horror tale that the movies have tried more often than novelists or shortstory writers. In fact, the movemakers seem to have tried a good many times to put a dictum that critics of the genre have handed down for years into actual practice that the horror tale works best when it is brief and comes directly to the point (most people associate that dictum with Poe, but Coleridge stated it before him, and in fact Poe was offering a guideline for the writer of all short stories, not just those dealing with the supernatural and the occult). Interestingly enough, the dictum seems to fail in actual practice. Most horror movies employing the framestory device to tell three or four short tales work unevenly or not at all.  But there are exceptions to every rule, obviously. While two adaptations of old ECcomics horror yarns, Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror, are miserable failures, Robert Bloch did two "framestory" films for the British Amicus production company, The House that Dripped Blood and Asylum. The stories in both of these were adapted from Bloch's own short stories, and both are good fun. Of course, the champ is still Dead of Night, the 1946 British film starring Michael Redgrave and directed by Robert Hamer, Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, and Basil Dearden. Does The House Next Door work? I think it does. It doesn't work as well as it could work, and the reader is left with what may be the wrong set of ambiguities about Walter and Colquitt Kennedy, but still, it works. "[ The House Next Door] came about, I suspect," Ms. Siddons writes, "because I have always been fond of the horror or occult genre, or whatever you may call it. It seemed to me that most of my favorite writers had tackled the ghost story at one time or another Henry James, Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dickens, et al., and I have enjoyed the more contemporary writers in the genre as much as I have the old classicists. Shirley Jackson's Hill House is as nearly perfect a hauntedhouse tale as I have ever read . . . and my favorite of all time, I think is M. F. K. Fisher's enchanting little The Lost, Strayed, Stolen. "The point would seem to be that, as every foreword to every anthology of horror stories you ever read assures you, the ghost story is timeless; it cuts across all lines of culture and class and all levels of sophistication; it communicates immediately somewhere in the vicinity of the base of your spine, and touches that crouching thing in all of us that still peers in abject terror past the fire into the dark beyond the cave door. If all cats are gray in the dark, so, basically, are all people afraid of it. "The haunted house has always spoken specially and directly to me as the emblem of particular horror. Maybe it's because, to a woman, her house is so much more than that it is kingdom, responsibility, comfort, total world to her . . . to most of us, anyway, whether or not we are aware of it. It is an extension of ourselves; it tolls in answer to one of the most basic chords mankind will ever hear. My shelter. My earth. My second skin. Mine. So basic is it that the desecration of it, the corruption, as it were, by something alien takes on a peculiar and bonedeep horror and disgust. It is both frightening and . . . violating, like a sly, terrible burglar. A house askew is one of the notrightest things in the world, and is terrible out of all proportion to its actual visitant .... "I came to write of a new house that was . . . let's say malignant . . . for the very simple reason that I wanted to see if I could write a good ghost story . . . . I was tired and rather simpleminded from a twoyear stint of heavy, serious, 'writery' writing, yet I wanted to be at work, and thought the ghost story would be fun . . . and as I was casting about in my mind for a good hook, or handle, a young architect bought the lovely, wooded lot next to our house and began to build a contemporary house on it. My writing room, upstairs under the eaves of our old house, looks right into the lot next door, and I would sit and stare dreamily out my window and watch the wild woods and hills go down and the house go up, and one day the inevitable 'What if' that starts all writers writing bloomed in my mind, and we were off. 'What if,' I thought, 'instead of an ancient haunted priory on the coast of Cornwall or a preRevolutionary farmhouse in Bucks County with a visitant or two, or even the ruins of an antebellum plantation house with a hoopskirted spectre wailing around the desecrated chimney for her lost world, you had a brandnew contemporary going up in an affluent suburb of a large city? You'd expect the priory and the farmhouse and the plantation to be haunted. But the contemporary? Wouldn't that give it an even meaner, nastier, little fillip? Serve to emphasize by contrast and horror? I thought it would . . . . "I'm still not sure how I arrived at the idea that the house would use its sheer loveliness to attract people, and then begin to turn their own deepest weaknesses, their soft spots, against them. It seemed to me that in this day of pragmatists and materialists, a conventional spectre would be almost laughable; in the suburb that I envisioned, the people do not believe in that sort of thing; it is almost improper. A traditional ghoulie would be laughed out of the neighborhood. So what would get to my quasisophisticated suburbanite? What would break relationships and crumble defenses and penetrate suburban armors? It would have to be different in each case. Each person has his own builtin horror button. Let's have a house that can isolate and push it, and then you've really got a case of the suburban willies. "The plot of the book emerged in one typewriter sitting almost whole and in infinite detail, as though it had been there all along just waiting o be uncovered . . . . The House Next Door was plotted and whole in a day. From there it looked to be great fun, and I set off on it with a light heart, because I thought it would be an easy book to write. And in a sense, it was these are my people. I am of this world. I know them from the skin out. They were of course, caricatures in most cases; most of the people I know are, thankfully, far more eccentric and not so determinedly suburban as this set of folks. But I needed them to be the way they were to make a point. And I found the limning of them went like greased lightning. "Because the whole point of this book, of course, is not so much the house and its peculiar, terrible power, but what effect it has on the neighborhood, and on the relationships between neighbors and friends, and between families, when they are forced to confront and believe the unbelievable. This has always been the power of the supernatural to me . . . that it blasts and breaks relationships between people and other people and between people and their world and, in a way, between people and the very essences of themselves. And the blasting and breaking leaves them defenseless and alone, howling in terror before the thing that they have been forced to believe. For belief is everything; belief is all. Without belief, there is no terror. And I think it is even more terrible when a modern man or woman, girded round with privilege and education and all the trappings of the socalled good life and all the freight of the clever, pragmatic, visionhungry modern mind, is forced to confront utter, alien, and elemental evil and terror. What does he know of this, what has it to do with him? What has the unspeakable and the unbelievable got to do with second homes and tax shelters and private schools for the kids and a pt in every terrine and a BMW in every garage? Primitive man might howl before his returning dead and point; his neighbor would see, and howl along with him . . . . The resident of Fox Run Chase who meets a ghoulie out by the hot tub is going to be frozen dead in his or her Nikes on the tennis courts the next day if he or she persists in gabbling about it. And there he is, alone with the horror and ostracized on all sides. It's a double turn of the screw, and I thought it would make a good story. "I still think it did . . . I think it holds up well . . . . But it is only now that I am able to read the book with any equanimity. About a third of the way through it, the writing ceased to be fun and became something as oppressive to me as it was obsessive; I realized I was into something vast and terrible and not at all funny; I was hurting and destroying people or allowing them to be hurt and destroyed, which amounts to the same thing. There is in me . . . some leftover streak of Puritan ethic, or squintyeyed Calvinistic morality, that insists that THINGS MUST HAVE A POINT. I dislike anything gratuitous. Evil must not be allowed to get away unpunished, even though I know that it does, every day. Ultimately . . . there must be a day of reckoning for the Bad Thing, and I still have no idea if this is a strength or weakness . . . . It certainly does not lend itself to subtleties, but I do not see myself as a 'clever' writer. And so The House Next Door became very serious business indeed to me; I knew that Colquitt and Walter Kennedy, whom I really liked very much indeed, would be destroyed by the house they in turn destroyed at the end of the book, but to me there was very real gallantry in the fact that they knew this themselves, and went ahead anyway . . . I was glad they did not run away . . . I would hope that, faced with something as overwhelmingly vast and terrible and left with so few options, I would have the grace and courage to do as they did. I speak of them as though they were outside my control because I feel as if they are, and most of the way through the book I felt this . . . . There is an inevitability about the outcome . . . that, to me, was inherent even on the first page of the book. It happened this way because this is the way it would have happened in this time and this place to these people. That is a satisfying feeling to me, and it is not one that I have had about all my books. And so in that sense, I feel that it succeeds . . . . "On its simplest level, I think it works well as a piece of horror fiction that depends on the juxtaposition of the unimaginably terrible with the utterly ordinary . . . the wonderful Henry James terror in sunlight' syndrome. Rosemary's Baby is the absolute master of this particular device, and it was that quality, in part, that I strove for. I also feel good about the fact that, to me, all the characters are still extremely sympathetic people, even this long after writing and after this many rereadings. I cared very much what happened to them as I unveiled them on the pages, and I still care about them. "Maybe it succeeds, too, in being an utterly contemporary horror tale. Maybe this is the wave of the future. It isn't the thing that goes bump in your house in the night that is going to do you in in this brave new world; it's your house itself. In a world where the very furniture of your life, the basic bones of your existence, turn terrible and strange, perhaps the only thing we're going to have to fall back on is whatever innate decency we can find deep within ourselves. In a way, I do not think this is a bad thing." A phrase that stands out in Siddon's analysis of her own workat least it stands out to meis this one ". . . to me there was very real gallantry," she says, "in the fact that they knew this themselves, and went ahead anyway . . ." We might think of this as a uniquely Southern sentiment, and as ladylike as she is, Anne Rivers Siddons is squarely in a Southern tradition of gothic writers. She tells us she has jettisoned the ruins of the antebellum plantation, and so she has, but in a wider sense, The House Next Door is very much the same spooky, tumbledown plantation home where writers as seemingly disparate but as essentially similar as William Faulkner, Harry Crews, and Flannery O'Connorprobably the greatest American shortstory writer of the postwar erahave lived before her. It is a home where even such a really gruesomely bad writer as William Bradford Huie has rented space from time to time. If the Southern experience were to be viewed as untilled soil, then we would have to say that almost any writer, no matter how good or bad, who deeply feels that Southern experience could plant a seed and have it growas an example I recommend Thomas Cullinan's novel The Beguiled (made into a good Clint Eastwood film, directed by Don Siegel). Here is a novel which is "written pretty good," as a friend of mine likes to put itmeaning, of course, nuthin' special. No Saul Bellow, no Bernard Malamud, but at least not down there in steerage with people like Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon, who apparently wouldn't know the difference between a balanced line of prose and a shitandanchovy pizza. If Cullinan had elected to write a more conventional novel, it would stick out in no one's mind. Instead, he came up with this mad gothic tale about a Union soldier who loses his legs and then his life to the deadly angels of mercy who dwell in a ruined girls' school that has been left behind in Sherman's march to the sea. This is Cullinan's little acre of that patch of untilled soil, soil which has always been amazingly rich. One is tempted to believe that outside of the South, such an idea wouldn't raise much more than ragweed. But in this soil, it grows a vine of potent, crazed beautythe reader is mesmerized with horror by what goes on in that forgotten school for young ladies. On the other hand, William Faulkner did more than drop a few seeds; he planted the whole damn garden . . . and everything he turned his hand to after 1930, when he really discovered the gothic form for fair, seemed to come up. The essence of the Southern gothic in Faulkner's work comes, for me, in Sanctuary, when Popeye stands on the scaffold, about to be hung. He has combed his hair neatly for the occasion, but now, with the rope around his neck and his hands tied behind his back, his hair has fallen lankly across his forehead. He begins to jerk his head, trying to flip his hair back into place. "I'll fix that for you," the executioner tells him, and pulls the trigger on the scaffold's trapdoor. Exit Popeye, with hair in his face. I believe with all my heart that no one brought up north of the MasonDixon Line could have thought of that scene, or written it right if he or she had done. Ditto the long, lurid, and excruciating scene in the doctor's waiting room which opens Flannery O'Connor's novella "Revelation." There are no doctor's waiting rooms like that outside the Southern imagination; holy Jesus, what a crew. My point is that there is something frighteningly lush and fertile in the Southern imagination, and this seems particularly so when it turns into the gothic channel. The case of the Harralsons, the first family to inhabit the Bad Place in Siddons's novel shows quite clearly how the author has put her own Southern gothic imagination to work. Pie Harralson, the girlwifeChiOmegaJuniorLeaguer, wields an unhealthy sort of attraction over her father, a beefy, choleric man from the "wire grass south." Pie seems quite aware that her husband, Buddy, makes a triangle with her at the apex and daddy at one of the lower corners. She plays the two of them off one another. The house itself is only another pawn in the lovehatelove affairs she seems to be having with her father ("That weird thing she has with him," one character says dismissively). Near the end of her first conversation with Colquitt and Walter, Pie says gleefully "Oh, Daddy's just going to hate this house! Oh, he's going to be fit to be tied!" Buddy, meanwhile, has been taken under the wing of Lucas Abbott, a new arrival at the law office where Buddy works. Abbott is a Northerner, and we hear passingly that Abbott left New York as the result of a scandal ". . . something about a law clerk." The house next door, which turns people's own deepest weaknesses against them, as Siddons says, fuses these elements neatly and horribly. Near the end of the housewarming party, Pie begins to scream. The guests rush to see what has happened to her. They find Buddy Harralson and Lucas Abbott embracing, naked, in the bedroom where the coats have been left. Pie's Daddy has found them first, and he is in the process of expiring of a stroke on the floor while his Punkin Pie screams on . . . and on . . . and on. Now if that isn't Southern gothic, what is? The essence of the horror in this scene (which for some reason reminds me strongly of that heartstopping moment in Rebecca where the nameless narrator stops the party cold by floating down the stairs in the costume also worn by Maxim's dreadful first wife) lies in the fact that social codes have not merely been breached; they have been exploded in our shocked faces. Siddons pulls this particular dynamite blast off perfectly. It is a case of everything going just about as totally wrong as things can go; lives and careers are ruined irrevocably in a passage of seconds. We need not analyze the psyche of the horror writer; nothing is so boring or so annoying as people who ask things like. "Why are you so weird?" or "Was your mother scared by a twoheaded dog while you were in utero?' Nor am I going to do that here, but I'll point out that much of the walloping effect of The House Next Door comes from its author's nice grasp of social boundaries. Any writer of the horror tale has a clearperhaps even a morbidly overdevelopedconception of where the country of the socially (or morally, or psychologically) acceptable ends and that great white space of Taboo begins. Siddons is better at marking the edges of the socially acceptable from the socially nightmarish than most (although Daphne Du Maurier comes to mind again), and I'll bet that she was taught young that you don't eat with your elbows on the table . . . or make abnormal love in the coatroom. She returns to the breach of social codes again and again (as she does in an earlier, nonsupernatural novel about the south, Heartbreak Hotel), and on its most rational, symbolic level, The House Next Door can be read as a funnyhorrible sociological treatise on the mores and folkways of the Modestly Suburban Rich. But beneath this, the heart of the Southern gothic beats strongly. Colquitt tells us she could not bear to tell her closest friend what she saw on the day when Anita Sheehan finally and irrevocably lost her mind, but she is able to tell us in vivid, shocking detail. Horrified or not, Colquitt saw it all. She herself makes a "New SouthOld South" comparisons near the beginning of the novel, and the novel taken as a whole is another. On the surface we see "the obligatory tobaccobrown Mercedeses," vacations at Ocho Rios, Bloody Marys sprinkled thickly with fresh dill at Rinaldi's. But the stuff underneath, the stuff which makes the heart of this novel pulse with such a tremendous crude strength, is the Old Souththe Southern gothic stuff. Underneath, The House Next Door is not situated in a tony Atlanta suburb at all; it is located in that grimly grotty country of the heart that Flannery O'Connor mapped so well. Scratch Colquitt Kennedy deeply enough and we find O'Connor's Mrs. Turpin, standing in her pigpen and waiting for a revelation. If the book has a serious problem, it lies in our perception of Walter, Colquitt, and the third major character, Virginia Guthrie. Our feelings about these characters are not particularly sympathetic, and while it is not a rule that they should be, the reader may find it hard to understand why Siddons likes them, as she says she does. Through most of the book, Colquitt herself is particularly unappetizing vain, classconscious, moneyconscious, sexually priggish, and vaguely exhibitionistic at the same time. "We like our lives and our possessions to run smoothly," she tells the reader with a maddening complacency early on. "Chaos, violence, disorder, mindlessness all upset us. They do not frighten us, precisely, because we are aware of them. We watch the news, we are active in our own brand of rather liberal politics. We know we have built a shell for ourselves, but we have worked hard for the means to do it; we have chosen it. Surely we have the right to do that." In all fairness, part of this is meant to set us up for the changes that Colquitt and Walter undergo as a result of the supernatural didoes next doorthat damned house is doing what Bob Dylan called bringing it all back home. Siddons undoubtedly means to tell us that the Kennedys eventually arrive at a new plateau of social consciousness; after the episode with the Sheehans, Colquitt tells her husband "You know, Walter, we've never stuck our necks out. We've never put ourselves or anything we really value on the line. We've taken the best life has to give . . . and we really haven't given anything back." If this is so, then Siddons succeeds. The Kennedys pay with their lives. The novel's problem may be that the reader is apt to feel that the dues paid were fair ones. Siddons's own view on just what the Kennedys' rising social consciousness means is also muddier than I would like. If it is a victory, it seems to be of the Pyrrhic variety; their world has been destroyed by their conviction that they must warn the world against the house next door, but their conviction seems to have given them remarkably little inner peace in returnand the book's kicker seems to indicate that their victory has a decidedly hollow ring. Colquitt does not just put on her sunhat when she goes out to do the garden; she puts on her Mexican sunhat. 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 executiona 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 themselvesas 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 womba 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 hottubbing 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 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. American gothic, where we have, instead of a symbolic womb, a symbolic mirror. 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 outwhat 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 meism, it should not be surprising that the horror genre has turned more and more to trying to show us a reflection we won't likeour own. While looking at The House Next Door, we find we can lay the Tarot card of the Ghost asidethere 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 alwaysknowingly or unknowinglymimic the classic story of Narcissus; in the Lon Chaney, Jr., version, we observe Chaney observing himself in the EverPopular 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 dressingroom 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 nineteenthcentury 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 houseone so evillooking, 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 greatgrandfather had built it."  Hehhehheh, 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 ghostbusters who gather in a house of ill repute. It recounts their adventures there, and culminates with a scary, mystifying climax. The ghostbustersEleanor, Theo, and Lukehave come together under the auspices of one Dr. Montague, an anthropologist whose hobby is investigating psychic phenomena. Luke, a young wiseguy 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 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." "abnormal" events in the pastthe 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, Theoplayed by Claire Bloomis 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). But it is Eleanor, on whose house stones fell when she was a little girl, that the novel is vitally concerned with, and it is the character of Eleanor and Shirley Jackson's depiction of it that elevates The Haunting of Hill House into the ranks of the great supernatural novelsindeed, it seems to me that it and James's The Turn of the Screw are the only two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years (although we might add two long novellas Machen's "The Great God Pan" and Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness"). "Nearly all the characters of the new American gothic are narcissistic. . . weaklings who try to read their own preoccupations into reality." Try this shoe on Eleanor, and we find it fits perfectly. She is obsessively concerned with herself, and in Hill House she finds a huge and monstrous mirror reflecting back her own distorted face. She is a woman who has been profoundly stunted by her upbringing and her family life. When we are inside her mind (which is almost constantly, with the exception of the first chapter and the last), we may find ourselves thinking of that old Oriental custom of foot bindingonly it is not Eleanor's feet that have been bound; it is that part of her mind where the ability to live any sort of independent life must begin. "It is true that Eleanor's characterization is one of the finest in Miss Jackson's works," Lenemaja Friedman writes. "It is second only to that of Merricat in the later novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. There are many facets to Eleanor's personality she can be gay, charming, and witty when she feels wanted; she is generous and willing to give of herself. At the same time, she resents Theo's selfishness and is ready to accuse Theo of trickery when they discover the sign on the wall. For many years, Eleanor has been filled with frustration and hate she has come to hate her mother and then finally her sister and brotherinlaw for taking advantage of her more submissive and passive nature. She struggles to overcome the guilt she feels for the death of her mother. "Although one comes to know her quite well, she remains mysterious. The mystery is a product of Eleanor's uncertainty and her mental and emotional changes, which are difficult to fathom. She is insecure and, therefore, unstable in her relationships with others and her relationship to the house. She feels the irresistible force of the spirits and longs, finally, to submit to them. When she does decide not to leave Hill House, one must assume she is slipping into madness."  Hill House, then, is the microcosm where universal forces collide, and in his piece on The Sundial (published in 1958, a year before The Haunting of Hill House), John G. Park goes on to speak of "the voyage . . . the attempt to flee . . . an attempt to escape . . . cloying authoritarianism . . . This is, in fact, the place where Eleanor's own voyage begins, and also the motive for that voyage. She is shy, withdrawn, and submissive. The mother has died, and Eleanor has judged and found herself guilty of negligenceperhaps even murder. She has remained firmly under the thumb of her married sister following her mother's death, and early on Friedman, Shirley Jackson, p. 133. there's a bitter argument over whether Eleanor will be allowed to go to Hill House at all. And Eleanor, who is thirtytwo, habitually claims to be two years older. She does manage to get out, practically stealing the car which she has helped to purchase. The jailbreak is on, Eleanor's attempt to escape what Park calls "cloying authoritarianism." The journey will lead her to Hill House, and as Eleanor herself thinkswith a growing, feverish intensity as the story progresses"journeys end in lovers meeting." Her narcissism is perhaps most strikingly established by a fantasy she indulges in while still on the way to Hill House. She stops the car, full of "disbelief and wonder" at the sight of a gate flanked by ruined stone pillars in the middle of a long line of oleanders. Eleanor recalls that oleanders are poisonous . . . and then Will I, she thought, will I get out of my car and go between the ruined gates and then, once I am in the magic oleander square, find that I have wandered into a fairyland, protected poisonously from the eyes of people passing? Once I have stepped between the magic gateposts, will I find myself through the protective barrier, the spell broken? I will go into a sweet garden, with fountains and low benches and roses trained over arbors, and find one pathjeweled, perhaps, with rubies and emeralds, soft enough for a king's daughter to walk upon with her little sandaled feetand it will lead me directly to the palace which lies under a spell. I will walk up low stone steps past stone lions guarding and into a courtyard where a fountain plays and the queen waits, weeping, for the princess to return . . . And we shall live happily ever after. The depth of this sudden fantasy is meant to startle us, and it does. It suggests a personality to which fantasizing has become a way of life . . . and what happens to Eleanor at Hill House comes uncomfortably close to fulfilling this strange fantasydream. Perhaps even the happilyeverafter part, although I suspect Shirley Jackson would doubt that. More than anything, the passage indicates the unsettling, perhaps mad depths of Eleanor's narcissismweird home movies play constantly inside her head, movies of which she is the star and the sole moving forcemovies which are the exact opposite of her real life, in fact. Her imagination is restless, fertile . . . and perhaps dangerous. Later, the stone lions she has imagined in the passage quoted turn up as ornamental bookends in the totally fictional apartment she has imagined for Theo's benefit. In Eleanor's life, that turninginward which Park and Malin associate with the new American gothic is a constant thing. Shortly after the enchanted castle fantasy, Eleanor stops for lunch and overhears a mother explaining to a waitress why her little girl will not drink her milk. "She wants her cup of stars," the mother says. "It has stars in the bottom, and she always drinks her milk from it at home. She calls it her cup of stars because she can see the stars while she drinks her milk." Eleanor immediately turns this into herself "Indeed yes, Eleanor thought; indeed, so do I; a cup of stars, of course." Like Narcissus himself, she is quite unable to deal with the outside world in any other way than as a reflection of her inner world. The weather in both places is always the same. But leave Eleanor for the time being, making her way toward Hill House "which always waits at the end of the day." We'll beat her there, if that's okay with you. I said that The House Next Door forms a provenance in its entirety; the provenance of Hill House is established in classic ghoststory fashion by Dr. Montague in just eleven pages. The story is told (of course!) by the fire with drinks in hand. The salient points Hill House was built by an unreconstructed Puritan named Hugh Crain. His young wife died moments before she would have seen Hill House for the first time. His second wife died of a fallcause unknown. His two little girls remained in Hill House until the death of Crain's third wife (nothing therethat wife died in Europe), and were then sent to a cousin. They spent the rest of their lives quarreling over ownership of the mansion. Later, the older sister returns to Hill House with a companion, a young girl from the village. The companion becomes particularly important because it is in her that Hill House seems most specifically to mirror Eleanor's own life. Eleanor too was a companion, during her mother's long terminal illness. Following the death of old Miss Crain, there are stories of neglect; "of a doctor called too late," Montague says, "of the old lady lying neglected upstairs while the younger woman dallied in the garden with some village lout . . ." More bitter feeling followed the death of the old Miss Crain. There was a court case over ownership between the companion and the young Miss Crain. The companion finally wins . . . and shortly after commits suicide by hanging herself in the turret. Later tenants have been . . . well, uncomfortable in Hill House. We have hints that some have been more than uncomfortable; that some of them may actually have fled from Hill House, screaming in terror. "Essentially," Montague says, "the evil is in the house itself, I think. It has enchained and destroyed its people and their lives, and it is a place of contained ill will." And the central question that The Haunting of Hill House poses for the reader is whether or not Montague is right. He prefaces his story with several classical references to what we've been calling the Bad Placethe Hebraic for haunted, as in haunted house, tsaraas, meaning "leprous"; Homer's phrase for it, aidao domos, meaning a house of Hades. "I need not remind you," Montague says, ". . . that the concept of certain houses as unclean or forbiddenperhaps sacredis as old as the mind of man." As in The House Next Door, the one thing we can be sure of is that there are no actual ghosts in Hill House. None of the four characters come upon the shade of the companion flapping up the hall with a rope burn around her ectoplasmic neck. This is well enough, howeverMontague himself says that in all the records of psychic phenomena, one cannot find any case where a ghost actually hurt a person. What they do if they are malign, he suggests, is work on the mind. One thing we do know about Hill House is that it is all wrong. It is no one thing we can put our finger on; it's everything. Stepping into Hill House is like stepping into the mind of a madman; it isn't long before you weird out yourself. No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair . . . . The face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice. And even more chilling, more to the point Eleanor shook herself, turning to see the room complete. It had an unbelievably faulty design which left it chillingly wrong in all its dimensions, so that the walls seemed always in one direction a fraction longer than the eye could endure, and in another direction a fraction less than the barest tolerable length; this is where they want me to sleep, Eleanor thought incredulously; what nightmares are waiting, shadowed, in those high cornerswhat breath of mindless fear will drift across my mouth . . . and shook herself again. Really, she told herself, really, Eleanor. We see a horror story developing here that Lovecraft would have embraced enthusiastically, had he lived long enough to read it. It might even have taught the Old Providence Spook a thing or two. H.P.L. was struck by the horror of wrong geometry; he wrote frequently of nonEuclidian angles that tortured the eye and hurt the mind, and suggested other dimensions where the sum of a triangle's three corners might equal more or less than 180. Contemplating such things, he suggested, might be enough in itself to drive a man crazy. Nor was he far wrong; we know from various psychological experiments that when you tamper with a man or woman's perspective on their physical world, you tamper with what may actually be the fulcrum of the human mind. Other writers have dealt with this fascinating idea of perspective gone haywire; my own favorite is Joseph Payne Brennan's short story "Canavan's Back Yard," where an antiquarian bookdealer discovers that his weedy, ordinary back yard is much longer than it seemsit runs, in fact, all the way to the portholes of hell. In Charles L. Grant's The Hour of the Oxrun Dead, one of the main characters discovers he can no longer find the borders of the town where he has lived all his life. We see him crawling along the verge of the highway, looking for the way back in. Unsettling stuff. But Jackson handled the concept better than anyone, I thinkcertainly better than Lovecraft, who understood it but apparently couldn't show it. Theo enters the bedroom she will share with Eleanor looking incredulously at a stainedglass window, a decorative urn, the pattern in the carpet. There is nothing wrong with these things taken one by one; it is just that when we add up the perceptual equivalent of their angles, we come out with a triangle where the sum of the corners equals a bit more (or a bit less) than 180. As Anne Rivers Siddons points out, everything in Hill House is skewed. There is nothing which is perfectly straight or perfectly levelwhich may be why doors keep swinging open or shut. And this idea of skew is important to Jackson's concept of the Bad Place because it heightens those feelings of altered perception. Being in Hill House is like tripping on a lowwatt dosage of LSD, where everything seems strange and you feel you will begin to hallucinate at any time. But you never quite do. You just look incredulously at a stainedglass window . . . or a decorative urn . . . or the pattern on the carpet. Being in Hill House is like looking into one of those trick rooms where folks look big at one end and small at the other. Being in Hill House is like lying in bed in the dark on the night you went three drinks beyond your capacity . . . and feeling the bed begin to spin slowly around and around . . . . Jackson suggests (always in her low, insinuating voicethis, along with The Turn of the Screw, may very well be where Peter Straub got the idea that the horror story works best when it is "ambiguous and lowkey and restrained") these things quietly and rationally; she is never strident. It is just, she says, that being in Hill House does something fundamental and unpleasant to the screen of perception. This is what, she suggests, being in telepathic contact with a lunatic would be like. Hill House is evil; we'll accept Montague's postulate. But how responsible is Hill House for the phenomena which follow? There are knockings in the nighthuge thunderings, rather, which terrify both Theo and Eleanor. Luke and Professor Montague attempt to track down a barking dog and get lost within a stone's throw of the houseshades of Canavan the bookdealer (Brennan's story predates The Haunting of Hill House) and Charles Grant's strange little town of Oxrun, Connecticut. Theo's clothes are splattered with some foul red substance ("red paint," Eleanor says . . . but her terror suggests a more sinister substance) that later disappears. And written in the same red substance, first in the hall and then over the wardrobe where the ruined clothes have been hung are these words COME HOME, ELEANOR . . . HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR. Here, in this writing, is where the lives of Eleanor and of this evil house, this Bad Place, become inextricably entwined. The house has singled her out. The house has chosen her . . . or is it the other way around? Either way, Eleanor's idea that "journeys end in lovers meeting" becomes ever more ominous. Theo, who has some telepathic ability, begins to suspect more and more that Eleanor herself is responsible for most of the manifestations. A kind of lowkey tension has built up between the two women, ostensibly over Luke, with whom Eleanor has begun to fall in love, but it probably springs more deeply from Theo's intuition that not everything which is happening in Hill House is of Hill House. We know there has been an incident of telekinesis in Eleanor's past; at the age of twelve, stones fell from the ceilings "and pattered madly on the roof." She denieshysterically deniesthat she had anything at all to do with the incident of the stones, focusing instead on the embarrassment it caused her, the unwanted (she says it was unwanted, anyway) attention that it brought upon her. Her denials have an odd effect upon the reader, one of increasing weight in light of the fact that most of the afferent phenomena which the four of them experience in Hill House could be ascribed either to poltergeists or to telekinetic phenomena. "They never even told me what was going on," Eleanor says urgently even after the conversation has moved on from the episode of the stonesno one is even really listening to her, but in the closed circle of her own narcissistic world, it seems to her that this strange, longago phenomenon must be all they can think of (as it is all she can think ofthe outer weather must reflect the inner weather). "My mother said it was the neighbors, they were always against us because she wouldn't mix with them. My mother" Luke interrupts her to say, "I think all we want here is the facts." But for Eleanor, the facts of her own life are all she can cope with. How responsible is Eleanor for the tragedy which ensues? Let's look again at the peculiar words the ghostbusters find written in the hall HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR. The Haunting of Hill House; submerged as' it is in the twin ambiguities of Eleanor's personality and those of Hill House itself, becomes a novel that can be read in many different ways, a novel which suggests almost endless paths and a wide range of conclusions. HELP ELEANOR, for instance. If Eleanor herself is responsible for the writing, is she asking for help? If the house is responsible, is it asking her for help? Is Eleanor creating the ghost of her own mother? Is it mother who is calling for help? Or has Hill House probed Eleanor's mind and written something which will play on her gnawing sense of guilt? That longago companion whom Eleanor so resembles hung herself after the house became hers, and guilt may well have been her motive. Is the house trying to do the same to Eleanor? In The House Next Door, this is exactly how the contemporary Kim Dougherty has built works on the minds of its tenantsprobing for the weak points and preying on them. Hill House may be doing this alone . . . it may be doing it with Eleanor's help . . . or Eleanor may be doing it alone. The book is subtle, and the reader is left in large part to work these questions out to his or her own satisfaction. What about the rest of the phraseCOME HOME ELEANOR? Again we may hear the voice of Eleanor's dead mother in this imperative, or the voice of her own central self, crying out against this new independence, this attempt to escape Park's "cloying authoritarianism" and into an exhilarating but existentially scary state of personal freedom. I see this as the most logical possibility. As Merricat tells us in Jackson's final novel that "we have always lived in the castle," so Eleanor Vance has always lived in her own closed and suffocating world. It is not Hill House which frightens her, we feel; Hill House is another closed and suffocating world, walled in, cupped by hills, secure behind locked gates when the dark of night has fallen. The real threat she seems to feel comes from Montague, even more from Luke, and most of all from Theo. "You've got foolishness and wickedness all mixed up," Theo tells Eleanor after Eleanor has voiced her unease at painting her toenails red like Theo's. She simply tosses the line off, but such an idea strikes very close to the basis of Eleanor's most closely held life concepts. These people pose to Eleanor the possibility of another way of life, one which is largely antiauthoritarian and antinarcissistic. Eleanor is attracted and yet repelled by the prospectthis is a woman who, at thirty two, feels daring when buying two pairs of slacks, after all. And it is not very daring of me to suggest that COME HOME ELEANOR is an imperative Eleanor has delivered to herself; that she is Narcissus unable to leave the pool. There is a third implication here, however, one which I find almost too horrifying to contemplate, and it is central to my own belief that this is one of the finest books ever to come out of the genre. Quite simply stated, COME HOME ELEANOR may be Hill House's invitation for Eleanor to join it. Journeys end in lovers meeting is Eleanor's phrase for it, and as her end approaches, this old children's rime occurs to her Go in and out the windows, Go in and out the windows, Go in and out the windows, As we have done before. Go forth and face your lover, Go forth and face your lover, Go forth and face your lover, As we have done before. Either wayHill House or Eleanor as the central cause of the hauntingthe ideas Park and Malin set forth hold up. Either Eleanor has succeeded, through her telekinetic ability, in turning Hill House into a giant mirror reflecting her own subconscious, or Hill House is a chameleon, able to convince her that she had finally found her place, her own cup of stars caught in these brooding hills. I believe that Shirley Jackson would like us to come away from her novel with the ultimate belief that it was Hill House all along. That first paragraph suggests "outside evil" very stronglya primitive force like that which inhabits Anne River Siddons's house next door, a force which is divorced from humankind. In Eleanor's end we may feel that there are three layers of "truth" here Eleanor's belief that the house is haunted; Eleanor's belief that the house is her place, that it has just been waiting for someone like her; Eleanor's final realization that she has been used by a monstrous organismthat she has, in fact, been manipulated on the subconscious level into believing that she has been pulling the strings. But it has all been done with mirrors, as the magicians say, and poor Eleanor is murdered by the ultimate falsehood of her own reflection in the brick and stone and glass of Hill House I am really doing it, she thought, turning the wheel to send the car directly at the great tree at the curve of the driveway. I am really doing it, I am doing this all by myself, now, at last this is me. I am really really really doing it by myself. In the unending, crashing second before the car hurled into the tree, she thought clearly, Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don't they stop me? "I am doing this all by myself now, at last this is me," Eleanor thinksbut of course it is impossible for her to believe otherwise in the context of the new American gothic. Her last thought before her death is not of Hill House, but of herself. The novel ends with a reprise of the first paragraph, closing the loop and completing the circuit . . . and leaving us with an unpleasant surmise if Hill House was not haunted before, it certainly is now. Jackson finishes by telling us that whatever walked in Hill House walked alone. For Eleanor Vance, that would be business as usual. 4 A novel that makes a neat bridge away from the Bad Place (and perhaps it's time we got away from these haunted houses before we come down with a terminal case of the creeps) is Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby (1967). I used to be fond of telling people, at the time Roman Polanski's film version came out, that it was one of those rare cases where if you had read the book you didn't have to see the movie, and if you had seen the movie, you didn't have to read the book. That is not really the truth (it never is), but Polanski's film version is remarkably true to Levin's novel, and both men seem to share an ironic turn of humor. I don't believe anyone else could have made Levin's remarkable little novel quite so well . . . and by the way, while it is remarkable for Hollywood to remain so faithful to a novel (one sometimes thinks that major movie companies pay staggering sums for books just so they can tell their authors all the parts of them that don't worksurely some of the most expensive egotripping in the history of American arts and letters), it is not remarkable in Levin's case. Every novel he has was ever written has been a marvel of plotting. He is the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel; in terms of plot, he makes what the rest of us do look like those fivedollar watches you can buy in the discount drugstores. This fact alone has made Levin almost invulnerable to the depredations of the storychangers, those subvertors who are more concerned with visual effect than with a coherent storyline. Levin's books are constructed as neatly as an elegant house of cards; pull one plot twist, and everything comes tumbling down. As a result, moviemakers have been pretty much forced to show us what Levin built. About the film Levin himself says, "I've always felt that the film of Rosemary's Baby is the single most faithful adaptation of a novel ever to come out of Hollywood. Not only does it incorporate whole chunks of the book's dialogue, it even follows the colors of clothing (where I mentioned them) and the layout of the apartment. And perhaps more importantly, Polanski's directorial style of not aiming the camera squarely at the horror but rather letting the audience spot it for themselves off at the side of the screen coincides happily, I think, with my own writing style. "There was a reason for his fidelity to the book, incidentally . . . . His screenplay was the first adaptation he had written of someone else's material; his earlier films had all been originals. I think he didn't know it was permittednay, almost mandatoryto make changes. I remember him calling me from Hollywood to ask in which issue of the New Yorker Guy had seen the shirt advertised. To my chagrin I had to admit I'd faked it; I had assumed any issue of the New Yorker would have a handsome shirt advertised in it. But the correct issue for the time of the scene didn't." Levin has written two horror novels Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wlives and while both shine with the exquisite plotting that is Levin's trademark, probably neither is quite as effective as his first book, which is unfortunately not much read these days. A Kiss Before Dying is a gritty suspense story told with great lanrarity enough, but what is even more rare is that the book (written while Levin was in his early twenties) contains surprises which really surprise . . . and it is rela In case you're one of the five or six readers of popular fiction in America who has missed them, they are A Kiss Before Dying, Rosemary's Baby, This Perfect Day, The Stepford Wives, and The Boys from Brazil. He has written two Broadway plays, Veronica' Room and the immensely successful Deathtrap. Less known is a modest but chillingly effective madeforTV movie called Dr. Cook's Garden, starring Bing Crosby in a wonderfully adroit performance. Postively impervious to that awful, dreadful goblin of a reader, he or she WHO TURNS TO THE LAST THREE PAGES TO SEE HOW IT CAME OUT. Do you do this nasty, unworthy trick? Yes, you! I'm talking to you! Don't slink away and grin into your hand! Own up to it! Have you ever stood in a bookshop, glanced furtively around, and turned to the end of an Agatha Christie to see who did it, and how? Have you ever turned to the end of a horror novel to see if the hero made it out of the darkness and into the light? If you have ever done this, I have three simple words which I feel it is my duty to convey SHAME ON YOU! It is low to mark your place in a book by folding down the corner of the page where you left Off; TURNING TO THE END TO SEE HOW IT CAME OUT is even lower. If you have this habit, I urge you to break it . . . break it at once!  Well, enough of this digression. All I intended to say about A Kiss Before Dying is that the book's biggest surprisethe real screeching bombshellis neatly tucked away about one hundred pages into the story. If you should happen upon this moment while thumbing randomly through the book, it means nothing to you. If you have read everything faithfully up to that point, it means . . . everything. The only other writer I can think of offhand who had that wonderful ability to totally ambush the reader was the late Cornell Woolrich (who also wrote under the name of William Irish), but Woolrich did not have Levin's dry wit. Levin speaks affectionately of Woolrich as an influence on his own career, mentioning Phantom Lady and The Bride Wore Black as particular favorites. Levin's wit is probably a better place to start with Rosemary's Baby than his ability to plot a story. His output of novels has been relatively smallit averages out to one every five years or sobut it's interesting to note that one of the five, The Stepford Wives, works best as outright satire (William Goldman, the novelistscreenwriter who adapted that book for the screen, knew it; you will remember that earlier on we mentioned "Oh Frank, you're the best, you're the champ"), almost as farce, and Rosemary's Baby is a kind of socioreligious satire. We might also mention The Boys from Brazil, Levin's most recent novel, when we speak of his wit. The title itself is a pun, and although the book deals (even if only peripherally) with subjects such as the German death I have always wanted to publish a novel with the last thirty pages simply left out. The reader would be mailed these final pages by the publisher upon receipt of a satisfactory summary of everything that had happened in the story up to that point. That would certainly put a spoke in the wheels of those people who TURN TO THE END TO SEE HOW IT CAME OUT. camps and the socalled "scientific experiments" that were carried out there (some of the "scientific experiments," we will recall, included trying to impregnate women with the sperm of dogs and administering lethal doses of poison to identical twins in order to see if they would expire in a similar span of time), it vibrates with its own nervous wit and seems to parody those MartinBormannisaliveandwellandlivinginParaguay books that are apparently going to be with us even unto the end of the world. I am not suggesting that Ira Levin is either Jackie Vernon or George Orwell masquerading in a fright wignothing so simple or simplistic. I am suggesting that the books he has written achieve suspense without turning into humorless thudding tracts (two novels of the Humorless, Thudding Tract School of horror writing are Damon, by C. Terry Cline, and The Exorcist, by William Peter BlattyCline has since improved as a writer, and Blatty has fallen silent . . . forever, if we are lucky). Levin is one of the few writers who has returned more than once to the field of horror and the supernatural and who seems unafraid of the fact that much of the material the genre deals with is utterly foolishand at that, he has done better than many critics, who visit the genre the way rich white ladies once visited the children of New England factory slaves on Thanksgiving with food baskets and on Easter with chocolate eggs and bunnies. These slumming critics, unaware both of their own infuriating elitism and their total ignorance of what popular fiction does and what it is about, are able to see the foolishness spawned as a byproduct of the bubbling potions, the pointy black hats, and all the other clanking huggermugger trappings of the supernatural tale, but are unable to seeor refuse to seethe strong and universal archetypes that underlie the best of them. The foolishness is there, all right; this is Rosemary's first look at the child she has given birth to His eyes were goldenyellow, all goldenyellow, with neither whites nor irises; all goldenyellow, with vertical blackslit pupils. She looked at him. He looked at her, goldenyellowly, and then at the swaying upsidedown crucifix.