Bookworming - The Well (1980) by Jack Cady

One of the most persistent tropes in horror is the haunted house and dang if I don't need to tell you that.  From the countless movies, books, "true stories", amusement park attractions and others you'd think that half the houses on your block will become haunted with little more than one measly murder-suicide.  As horror develops, as well as our psychological grasp on what horrifies us, the haunted house subgenre transforms along with it, adding new monsters, rooms and unknown threats, and while many of them are tedious there are a number of gems in the film canon, from Jean Epstein's The Fall of the House of Usher and James Whale's The Old Dark House to mid-century classics such as The Innocents, The Haunting and The Legend of Hell House and more recent successes such as Silent House and Crimson Peak.  There are plenty of literary haunted houses to choose from as well, such as The Haunting's source book The Haunting of Hill House and The Shining.  I'll admit that haunted house stories aren't my favorite subgenre, not that I don't love a number of movies that take place in them (and even more if you count how many non-haunted houses still confine protagonists in horror stories), but they often carry over a number of irritating problems and inconsistencies from ghost stories, the most primordial and yet most frustrating of horror genres.  The best haunted house stories are ones that shake things up, such as Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, and during the horror novel boom of the 1970's and '80's the genre was defined by two major successes, The Shining and Robert Marasco's Burnt Offerings, among others.  One book sticks in my mind particularly when thinking about this period, and although it slipped through the cracks a bit at the time a recent reprinting by the excellent Valancourt Books may give it a chance to be reappraised.  Published in 1980, The Well was the first novel of Pacific Northwest-based author Jack Cady, a longtime professor at PLU, and is one of the most creative and unusual haunted house stories I've ever seen, it's wonderful setup diving head-first into the idea that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

John Tracker is a man who has abandoned his own family, year before fleeing his ancestral home and the insanity of his elders, all of whom share the same mad quest: building the house with traps for the Devil.  In an effort to ready the house to be torn down to build a new highway, Tracker returns with his girlfriend in tow to see what remains of his family after a 20 year absence.  The house is crammed with traps and illusions, so much so that nobody unfamiliar with the layout can walk through without being killed, and since he's been gone new traps have come into being; this isn't helped by the presence of his grandmother Vera and the possibility his father and grandfather are maintaining and building traps.  However much Tracker thinks he knows the house it continues to change and baffle, revealing threats that are more than mechanical and the extent to how well the designs have worked - just not in the way anybody expected.

The Well is a great example of a book that can't easily be filmed, but not for a lack of visual content.  I'd wait in line overnight to see how the Tracker house would be depicted on screen, and considering how expensive a movie version of it would have to be the production values would most certainly be very high.  The problem with filming it is more that the true horrors come from internal struggles, from secrets and family histories, the collision of human ambition and otherworldly justice.  The house is more than the family home - it's a vortex of evil, accumulating every sin the Trackers have done to the world and twisting time and space to reflect its judgment.  Each chapter begins with a chronicle of the life of one of Tracker's ancestors, each one miniature jewels of storytelling in a mode that movies can never replicate.  As the climax draws nearer and Tracker's mission becomes direr the reader can feel an increasing weight of history and familial responsibility on his shoulders.  We live in strange times having lived entirely in an industrial nation - family bonds are probably weaker now than ever before and fewer young people are expected to carry on the traditions and work of their parents than in previous generations.  The Well was written during this shift and Cady was more than aware of where American society came from and where it was going.  The Tracker house is most certainly haunted and among the most byzantine and lethal of all haunted houses, but the resolution to the journey within it is a spiritual and philosophical one rather than a fistfight with ghosts.  I loved it, not just for its story and imagery but also for Cady's mature, silken prose, richly colored without being showy and proving that realist authors can have great love for poetry and metaphor.  It also helps that my copy is a first edition hardcover, complete with its dust jacket, that I got at a Goodwill for $3, and upon opening it I saw that it was signed by the author.  Perhaps time and space can be warped to deliver a message, in this case that I'm the exact kind of person to really love this book.  Step inside and be watch your step.

~PNK

Bookworming - The Fifty Year Sword (2005) by Mark Z. Danielewski

It's hard to properly assess a book as a "new classic", mostly because it's new and therefore hasn't stood the test of time to make sure that it was really all that great to begin with.  Being pushed out by a big publisher at the right time and with the right cover design can get a lot of critics to toss praise at it like flowers at an opera singer but that doesn't mean the book is actually good, just convenient for lots of people.  However, every now and then a book comes along that deservedly becomes a new classic, and in my mind no single book has had such a profoundly instant impact on literature and the cultural psyche than Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves.  Originally published online in sections, the book became an underground phenomenon, eventually getting published in a lavish, expanded edition by Pantheon to overwhelming acclaim from all sides.  Presented as a matryoshka doll of found documents - Pantheon's editors reprinting a manuscript that was an attempt to publish an academic dissertation analyzing a documentary film - the book chronicles the attempts to understand, and disastrous influence of, The Navidson Record, a home-movie doc of a family moving into a large country house in Virginia only to find that doors keep appearing in the walls and as such the house appears to be larger on the inside than the outside.  The family's descent into horror is mirrored by the dissertation's author's own mental fracturing, as well as the guy who found his manuscript, creating multiple layers of postmodern insanity.  It's a stunning book, one of my favorite novels ever, and it assured Danielewski a seat at the table for years to come.  Each novel he's written after that works diligently to redefine how books can be written, such as Only Revolutions, a love story written in two halves for each romantic partner, presented as two halves on the page running in opposite directions from each end of the book.  His most recent project is the massively ambitious The Familiar, a projected 27-volume serial novel whose three published volumes each run over 800 pages, and even the barest skimming reveals lively formatting trickery from flyleaf to flyleaf.  Today, however, I want to shine a light on his third book, The Fifty Year Sword, as a finale to this month's Halloween Bookworming article series.  Originally presented as a multimedia show only on Halloween, the novella was eventually published in the US in another lavish Pantheon edition with a strange, bumpy cover and bizarrely brilliant formatting, and in my mind it deserves every scrap of praise it can get as a new Halloween classic.

The story is told as intertwining flashbacks, narrated by five grown-up orphans who spent a fateful night together at an East Texas foster home when they were children.  The occasion is the 50th birthday party of Belinda Kite, and for evening's entertainment a social worker has hired a storyteller for the kids.  The storyteller arrives with few words and a long box with five latches, and his story concerns the contents of the box and how he got it.

That might not seem like much of a summary but trust me, you'll appreciate my leaving most of the detail for you to find.  The impact of the piece lies not just in the content, which is as imaginative as it is creepy, but also the storytelling itself and the feel of being a kid, sitting on the floor and listening to that story.  The art of scary storytelling stretches back as far as storytelling itself and for many children is their first exposure to horror fiction; one of my favorite book series as a kid (and now) was Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, assured-but-simple retellings of classic folk tales, literary stories and urban legends accompanied by incredible ink drawings by Stephen Gammell, one of the greatest illustrators of the latter half of the 20th century.  In many ways the success of this format is the foundation of all horror literature, and in The Fifty Year Sword the success isn't just how amazing the story is but how effectively it simulates a classic oral tale.

Another effectivity (not a word but I'll take it) is the visual presentation of all this, one that is about as unique as any narrative book I've seen.  The text is formatted to primarily be in a snaking column on the left side of two page spreads, appearing as a unified narrative strand but using color-coded quotation marks to signify which of the five orphans is speaking it.  The "real" narrator is identified as a woman who was working at the foster home at the time but the actual telling is done by the orphans many years later, and the use of different voices to tell an identical story is a deft tool to show the psychological effect the experience has had on them.  These quotations, as well as illustrations that show up later in the book (and sometimes completely overtake the spreads), are sewn rather than drawn, using thin thread in striking color combinations that gives a fantastic and grim story a strangely home-and-hearth feel.  What this could mean I don't have a good answer for at the moment but I suspect that any answer, especially the most evocative one, is the right one.

By the time you're reading this it's pretty close to Halloween and you might not have the time to get this, but make the effort if you can - it's not hard to find and it'll take you less than an hour to read it if you're determined.  It's a striking objet d'art as well as a novella and makes a great gift in any season, but more than anything it's an exemplary addition to the tradition of Halloween storytelling and I'm so happy that Danielewski has been given such publishing leeway that books like this can get made.

~PNK

Bookworming - The Victorian Chaise Longue (1953) by Marghanita Laski

It's good to re-recognize every once and awhile horror literature, either in short form or long, as the genre is dominated in the public eye by movies, most of which are of low artistic merit.  While not all literature is good just because it's literature horror fiction writing has the capacity to be just as high quality as any other literary genre, and while some authors are highly well-known, even record-breaking in their success (as with Stephen King, still the best-selling author of all time), lots of great stuff slips through the cracks and there isn't nearly the same public fanbase that supports horror books like horror flicks.  While we've got a week-and-a-bit before Halloween I'd like to spotlight a few of favorite horror novels that haven't gotten nearly the attention they deserve, and first is a perfect little nightmare, Marghanita Laski's The Victorian Chaise-longue.

Marghanita Laski (1915-1988) was a British novelist and record-breaking in her own right, setting the high bar for contributing quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary, about 250,000 of them during a 38 year span.  As a novelist she's best known for Little Boy Lost which was later turned into a movie starring Bing Crosby; the only other book of hers still read today, though never discussed as part of horror history, is The Victorian Chaise-longue.  I snagged it off a dollar book rack at a local Half Price Books and blew through it in about an hour.  After retrieving my socks and pants from the spot they'd been blown to I slid it onto the permanent section of my shelf and today you get to hear why.

Melanie is a sickly, naive young woman, fighting off an encroaching case of tuberculosis with fluff and sweetness.  On a shopping trip she spots a decaying chaise-longue chair on a heap at a junk store and is immediately attracted to it, purchasing it at the weary approval of her husband.  She gets it home and is visited by her doctor, whose assurances of her improving health are poor masks for what is most certainly the opposite.  She decides to take an afternoon nap in her new chair, and upon falling asleep awakes in a different room, a different body and a different time.  In her sleep state she has been transported into the body of Milly, a woman her own age and suffering from the same sickness who owned the chair in the late Victorian era and lived in the house across the river from her own.  Melanie has only her thoughts as herself and is a prisoner in her new body, hardly able to move or comprehend what is happening and subject to grudging care by Milly's harsh sister, one who alludes to past tragedies that Melanie can do nothing about.  As Milly's health continues to degrade Melanie gets closer to the awful truth of their connection and her own fate.

More of a novella than full novel, The Victorian Chaise-longue plays out like the creepiest installment of England's A Ghost Story for Christmas TV movie sequence we never got.  This isn't the kind of horror that has to rely on violence to disturb, but rather crafts a flawless gem of nightmare, where each new detail piles on unease and makes the reader cringe at the plight of one of horror's most vulnerable protagonists.  Part of what's so disturbing is that it's crushingly unfair what's happening to Melanie; while all horror protagonists have to be frightened and threatened in order for the reader to empathize with them, they at least can gather their wits and strength and make a best attempt for their lives - not so with Melanie.  She's not stupid per se but she's not the most clear-minded person, either, and her consumption and out-of-body-in-a-body situation shackles her down.  There's a reason that you can't sentence a criminal to death if they're unable to comprehend what's happening to them or if they did something wrong, and it's that same horror at an unjust universe that creeps under your skin all throughout The Victorian Chaise-longue.  But the real kicker, the part that blew off my aforementioned socks and pants, was the ending, that screaming wallop of an ending that tied my insides into a Gordian knot, one that I won't dare spoil for you.

The Victorian Chaise-longue has actually been filmed twice before, both as long-forgotten teleplays from the golden age of TV, but it's high time someone took a swing at it in a new series, though it's also high time there was a horror anthology series worth a damn.  It's length, simple story and slightly repetitive structure make it an easy adaptation to a 30 minute runtime and a skilled director could wring every drop of tension out of the setup with little more than set design and camera angles.  A number of British literary high-ups quite admired it when it was first published, including Penelope Lively and P.D. James, the latter of whom wrote the preface to Persephone Books's 1999 reprint, currently the only in-print edition of the book I know of.  This praise hasn't earned it a real place in horror history, though, as most lists of great horror novels of the last century skip over it and not many reference guides remember it, either, most likely due to its restraint and lack of traditional supernaturalism (not that these are marks against it, mind you).  If you've got a spare hour or two before Halloween give it a shot - it might not hook you immediately but stick with it and you'll be profoundly floored.  It's one of the best surprises I've had reading books, and that should be saying something.

~PNK