Incidental Haunted House Month! Hell House

Hell House by Richard Matheson

Horror (1971 - 301 pp.)

The year 2021 marks Hell House's 50-year anniversary. What a perfect time for more Richard Matheson on this blog, after 2013's entry on I Am Legend and 2019's entry on Somewhere in Time. It also marks the second haunted house-related entry in June 2021, after Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle.*

In Hell House, physicist Lionel Barrett, his wife Edith, spiritual medium Florence Tanner and physical medium Benjamin Franklin Fischer are offered $100,000 by aging plutocrat William Reinhardt Deutsch to investigate the Belasco House, the apparently most haunted house in the world, in Maine in 1970. Previous attempts in 1930 and 1940 had been catastrophic, with most of the investigators dying; a young Ben was part of the 1940 team. Lionel comes armed with the Reversor, a machine that is supposed to negate the electromagnetic energy he believes to be causing the haunting, whereas Florence is more concerned with connecting with the house's energy on a spiritual level. Ben, drawing on his terrifying past experience, wants to use his physical energy to draw out the haunting more gradually. Edith is given no qualification other than being Lionel's wife.

The family patriarch Emeric Belasco had apparently been an early 20th century man of some importance, had many guests, murdered or disfigured many of them, and murdered his son Daniel. As in any Clue-style mansion, the action occurs not only in such mundane rooms as bedrooms, but also in the steam room, swimming pool and chapel. In what I sincerely hope is not a spoiler, the house is indeed haunted.

Matheson's language is middling in description, sticking to the main characters while offering few details about the house's architecture. By the middle of the book, I could imagine Florence standing right in front of me, but I could not imagine what any of the bathrooms look like. Matheson makes the action work by using short, choppy sentences during horror scenes, such as Florence's descent to the cellar in search of Daniel Belasco's body:

She cried out as unseen hands clutched her by the throat. She reached up and began to grapple with the hands. They were cold and moist. She yanked them away and staggered to the side. Regaining direction, she lunged for the wall. (116)

Matheson uses similarly staccato wording when spirits chase Edith later in the book, keeping up the tension, which produces horror that is actually scary:

Darkness fled; she was acutely conscious, knowing even as she flung herself into the empty doorway that she hadn't been allowed to faint. She lunged into the corridor and headed for the stairs. The air was thick with mist. (270)

Other linguistic intrigues include the use of pseudoscientific language to add to the eeriness, such as Lionel referring to "teleplasmic" (93) energy used by his Reversor machine, as well as intense descriptions of gore best left to the reader (184, 267).

Although Hell House has an ensemble cast, Florence is arguably the protagonist. She is the primary victim of the book's grisly body horror, nearly torn to shreds by the book's end. Early on, Edith demurs at how beautiful Florence** is, while Florence's naked body is described in a moderate amount of detail. (95) Florence's body, beautiful as Edith finds it, ends up being a "living puppet", which leads to a scene even I was surprised to read. (242)

When Florence ends up with teeth marks around her nipples, purportedly made by the spirit of Daniel Belasco, the other investigators struggle to believe her (120-121); after a similar attack to her head, they openly wonder whether she is injuring herself during psychotic breaks. This raises a question that I was shocked was never answered. Find a solid chocolate bar, such as a Dairy Milk or Jersey Milk, and take a bite out of it. You'll see that the marks made in the remaining chocolate are shaped differently based on your top and bottom teeth, which are shaped differently. If Florence had bitten her own breasts, the bite marks would appear upside down, as she would have to bring her breast up to her face, so that her top teeth marks would be below her nipple. If the bite marks were right-side up, with the top teeth marks above the nipple, someone else must have done the biting. Matheson's narrator never tells the reader the direction of the bite marks, nor do the characters seem to bother inquiring.

Although Hell House was filmed as The Legend of Hell House in 1973, with Matheson writing the script, Hell House would likely be unfilmable*** today. Hell House's first 50 pages are relatively uneventful, making any properly proportioned movie a slow burn like Psycho more than a modern thriller. The characters' social norms are firmly rooted in Matheson's era, resembling Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land more than anything a modern feminist might appreciate. The Florence body horror scenes would especially shock 2021 audiences' consciences, or else they would have to be so toned down they would lose what makes them scary. (Not because of the gore, to which we are all properly desensitized in this post-Saw world, but in the way the scenes sensationalize the abuse of women.) Hell House's gruesome combination of sex and gore could have worked in the '80s and '90s slasher heyday, but would be seen as retrograde now. For a truly retro comparison, think of how the naturalistic, gory Grand Guignol theatres of 1920s France would not have been seen as appropriate fare during the straight-laced 1950s.

Not only does Hell House feel set in the past because it is too edgy for the present, even the characters' names reflect this. Edith and Florence are names people would have had in 1971 - if they had been 80 years old. (Lionel is slightly more modern, peaking in the 1920s before making a surprising resurgence in the 21st century.) Each of the characters is in his or her 40s, though. Ben is the most pointed example, having been named directly after Benjamin Franklin, (146) who far predates any of the book's events. The Franklin comparison is apt for Ben's calm, patient style of physical medium practice, which can be compared to Franklin's kite experiment, finding ambient electrical charge by relatively simple means.

Although Matheson often straddles genres, at times writing what appears to be science fiction without using any science (Matheson was a journalist by training, for reference), the science fiction nerd in me has to ask: how on Earth does the Reversor work? Although there are vivid descriptions of Florence's medium work during times when the Reversor is operating, a blood and guts description of the Reversor's mechanisms would have been fun. Then again, if the Reversor were so readily describable, we'd all have to live with a different horror: that of some smart young engineer making a homemade Reversor.

Although Hell House isn't as strong a work as Somewhere in Time, and especially not as strong as Matheson's classic I Am Legend, it reads even faster. Once you get past page 100, you won't put it down. As much as I'd recommend Hell House for Halloween, the events take place from December 20-24, 1970. Step aside, Nightmare Before Christmas. It's tough to imagine scarier Christmas entertainment than Hell House.

Ease of Reading: 9

Educational Content: 1

*In a strange coincidence, this is the second consecutive June featuring an incidental theme. June 2020 was Incidental Japan Month, when I read Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 and James Clavell's Shogun. Each of these books addresses a very different Japan, whereas each of June 2021's haunted house books are set in 20th-century New England.

**Florence is described as being 43 years old at the time of the investigation. This may be a feather in the cap of the "older models are pretty too" movement. However, it also makes the casting choice of 23-year-old Pamela Franklin in the 1973 movie The Legend of Hell House a curious one. I haven't yet seen the movie, but it looks like it'd pair well with my popcorn machine.

***New word? It might just be! I need to post a lexicon of all the words I improvise. What they all have in common is that they're close enough to existing words that their meanings are easy to derive from context.

Bonus Book! We Have Always Lived in the Castle

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Horror (1962 - 186 pp.)

Of Shirley Jackson's work, I was previously only familiar with "The Lottery", which I read - and loved - years ago, as well as the fantastic Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House. According to Jackson's biographer Judy Oppenheimer, when Jackson's physical and mental health deteriorated, her protagonists' own health went with it, in an extreme version of Real Life Writes the Plot. As We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Jackson's last, and purportedly best, work, it stands to reason that protagonist Mary Katherine ("Merricat") Blackwood is completely psychotic. Jackson does not disappoint.

The narrator, 18-year-old Merricat, lives with her 28-year-old sister Constance, their elderly uncle Julian, and, for a brief period during the book's second half, their 32-year-old cousin Charles. They inhabit the family home, located on a sprawling estate somewhere in New England, where Constance and Julian never leave. It falls to Merricat, and later Charles, to go shopping in the nearby village for books and groceries. Merricat is shunned by the villagers. The reader quickly finds out why; six years prior to the book, most of the Blackwood family died by arsenic poisoning, leaving only Merricat (who was not at dinner), Constance (who did not eat any poison) and Julian (who ate a small portion of poison, leaving him permanently disabled). Constance was charged with the murders but acquitted, although that helps her little in the local court of public opinion. The home dynamic resembles the classic 1962 movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, making 1962 a year marked by uncomfortable home drama creepiness.*

I saw the reveal (143) coming from essentially the start of the book, yet I was still impressed with Jackson's foreshadowing. Without spoiling any plot point, Merricat's frequent info dumping of her likes and dislikes, her predilections, and her deep-seated but unexplained hatreds come through numerous times. 

Where my perception of the book differs more from the traditional critical take is that I consider Charles to be a genuine good guy. He is preoccupied with the family fortune, but given how much longer Merricat and Constance have to live, the sisters should be thinking about money more. By contrast, in one scene, Merricat buries a substantial sum under the lawn, which Constance laughs off as an expression of Merricat's love of burying things. (115-116) Charles is frequently furious at the other characters, and rightly so; Merricat attempts to ward him off using magic, Julian calls Charles "John" after the deceased family patriarch, and Constance considers all of this and more to be perfectly tolerable. Meanwhile, Charles is so perplexed by Merricat's hostility toward him that he asks Jonas, "How can I make Cousin Mary like me?" (90) When Charles finally gives up on restoring the family relationship and finances, there is nothing left for Jackson to write. The Charles/Constance break is more of a game over for the Blackwood family than the original deaths or the housefire.

A subject that gripped me throughout the book is just how small the house's inhabitants' worlds are. For a book released contemporaneously with the Cuban Missile Crisis, there is no mention of the Cold War, no hint that any of the older characters could have been World War II veterans, and no mention of any place outside the small, unnamed New England village where Merricat shops. At the very start of the book, when Merricat passes the general store, she notes that "[i]n this village the men stayed young and did the gossiping and the women aged with grey evil weariness and stood silently waiting for the men to get up and come home." (13) It borders on preposterous that any character within Merricat's reclusive perception would ever think outside the boundaries of the village, which may as well be on a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific.** This geographic isolation presents the Blackwoods' situation as retrograde, so We Have Always Lived in the Castle would be believable as a period piece set as early as the American Civil War. More currently, it calls to mind pandemic-related isolation, as well as life in a hotel. Would Zoom have helped the Blackwoods, or would it have simply been another medium for shunning them?

I was stunned to learn that We Have Always Lived in the Castle was never released as a feature movie until 2018. With its film-friendly horror genre and deranged narrator, clocking in at a svelte 48,140 words, it seems like a logical choice for the big screen. On top of that, We Have Always Lived in the Castle would have virtually zero special effects. Of course, the movie is not available in Canada on any of the streaming services I have, so the question is moot anyway. Merricat's narration*** is scary enough.

Ease of Reading: 9

Educational Content: 2

*1962 is also the release year of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. By pure coincidence, 1962 was apparently a good year to release a novel ending in the word "Castle".

**Ironically, it is easier to imagine various science fiction characters who roam the galaxy jumping from solar system to solar system than to imagine Merricat, Constance or Julian walking two villages over.

***For a 1962-written comparison (what a year!), Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest intersects unreliable first-person narration with palpable mental illness. Books are arguably the best media at entering a narrator's head, especially with narrators like Merricat, who never even tell the reader what they look like, and tend to smash mirrors anyhow.

Up Close with Ontario's 2021 Gypsy Moth Explosion

2021 has seen one of the largest incidences of gypsy moths in Ontario in recent memory, eclipsing last year's gypsy moth bonanza. They're eating foliage.* They're "everywhere", causing "the worst infestation since the eighties". In a particularly scathing assessment, the Ottawa Citizen called gypsy moths, their caterpillars and their eggs "a cataclysmic insult".

Gypsy moth caterpillars "literally rain down out of the sky". 

They sure rained on me in the North Kawarthas earlier this month:

They crawled on my skin only briefly, so I didn't suffer any gypsy moth rash. They were actually kind of cute, as they periodically rear their front legs like tiny horses. Besides, who can resist something so small and fuzzy?**

Nonetheless, a pest is a pest, and a generally anti-pesticide person except when it's absolutely necessary, I thought: do any birds eat these critters?

The answer is that yes, they do, including some of Ontario's most iconic bird species. According to this Michigan State University bulletin from all the way back in April 1999:

Many birds do not like to feed on large, hairy gypsy moth caterpillars, but other species seem to relish them! Yellow-billed and black-billed cuckoos, blue jays, orioles and rufous-sided towhees are among the species that feed on gypsy moth caterpillars. Some birds, such as the black-capped chickadee, will also feed on egg masses and can sometimes cause substantial egg mortality.

Here's a closeup I snapped of a chickadee last October:

Either this one, or a similar chickadee, was so friendly it landed on my shoe - while it was on my foot. It was unfortunately too quick for me to get a picture, but these adorable chickadees apparently consider Eastern Ontario so familiar they're willing to land on its human inhabitants.

I've seen more blue jays farther south (in Toronto - how fitting), so it'd be nice to see them up in cottage country. I can't recall the last time I saw a cuckoo, a towhee or an oriole, but they'd be welcome.

One final issue: Terry McGlynn, the ecologist and conservationist who named the completely unrelated gypsy ants, regrets using the racist term "gypsy". In the interest of naming things, let's rename gypsy moths! Here are a few fun ideas:

• Destroyer moth, based on its Latin name Lymantria dispar
• Day moth or Sun moth, based on the fact that it is unusually diurnal
• Striped tree moth, based on its jagged stripe markings

I'm open to more ideas and fewer moths. Let's cross our fingers for an increase in the presence of local avians.

*I don't usually toot my own horn, but here, I must: my pictures are better than these Canadian Press pictures. Matthew Gordon, Ontario's new nature photographer?

**Remember Weepuls? Gypsy moth caterpillars are like living, elongated Weepuls.

June's Book: The Red Badge of Courage

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

War (1895 - 79 pp.)

In The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane tells a quintessential story about 18-year-old Henry Fielding,  a fresh recruit in the Union army in the Civil War. Crane was born in 1871, too late to serve in the Civil War, although he conducted an impressive dive into archival war research. He later served as a war correspondent in Greece during the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, a conflict perhaps best known in the United States for being covered by Crane. His other experiences include being stranded in a dinghy for 30 hours.* After all this, Crane died at age 28 in a sanatorium in the Black Forest. I rarely discuss authors' lives in such detail on here, typically preferring intrinsic analysis, but Crane's life is asking for a biopic. How I had somehow managed to read so much literature without encountering his work is a mystery to me, especially considering I have completed a course on American literature up to 1900.

The Red Badge of Courage is reminiscent of other turn-of-the-century** American adventure stories like White Fang and "A Resumed Identity", in terms of pulpy style and boundless optimism. Crane lived and wrote in arguably the most wide-eyed, forward-thinking era in American history, which shows in his use of the Civil War as a backdrop for camaraderie, wit, and the ability for a young man to learn how to take charge. Later Civil War stories showcase the war's brutality, such as in Bring the Jubilee, but Crane is content to have his teenage soldiers learn militaristic values. Fielding and his friend Wilson are shuttled around to different battlefields, at times carrying rifles or bearing standards. In a Looney Tunes-esque series of incidents, Fielding is whacked with a rifle, shot in the head just enough for it to hurt, and taken aback at how new some of the Confederate uniforms are.^ 

Crane's writing is fast-paced and magazine-like, with plenty of imagery. An early example of a battle scene could have been used as a US Army recruitment ad:^^

Bullets began to whistle among the branches of the trees. Showers of pine needles and pieces of wood came falling down. It was as if a thousand axes were being used.

The lieutenant of the youth’s regiment was shot in the hand. He began to curse so magnificently that a nervous laugh went through the regiment. It relieved the tightened senses of the men. (60)

The Red Badge of Courage is such an easy read, especially by the standards of often dense 19th-century fiction, I am stunned it is not in more educational curricula. That said, I have only ever attended high school in Ontario, where those inhabitants who do ever think about the US Civil War look on in horrified apoplexy. The phrase "Civil War" is just as likely to refer to the English Civil War here, or to the Guns 'N' Roses song.

Crane may be a difficult author to explain, values-wise. Before World War I, heroism in battle was so vaunted that soldiers would invite their own wounds: "At times he wished he were wounded. He believed persons with torn bodies were unusually happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound—a red badge of courage." (77) Although honour and duty are likely not completely expired virtues, it is difficult to identify with someone who sees the world the way Fielding sees it. Now, of course, veneration of 1890s-era values is confined to memorabilia collections. Perhaps an Art Nouveau revival is in order.

Thanks to the magic of the public domain, the book is available in its entirety here.

Ease of Reading: 9

Educational Content: 3

*Back in 2018, I was trapped in an elevator for an hour. This is the closest I have come to such a predicament. I also had a phone on me, which, suffice to say, someone in the 1890s decidedly did not.

**It never ceases to amaze me that, even after another century has turned, we still use the phrase "turn of the century" to describe the period surrounding the year 1900.

^It is unclear whether Crane's depiction of jaunty new Confederate uniforms (114) belies a lack of understanding of just how ragged Confederate uniforms tended to be, or whether Fielding lucks out by seeing what few new uniforms there were.

^^The Spanish-American War was fought three years after The Red Badge of Courage's release, and was portrayed using some of the same types of images. Teddy Roosevelt's charge up San Juan Hill could have been devised by Crane as a plot point.