Fathers and Sons

House of Windows by John Langan (2009): John Langan's first novel is terrific, an erudite ghost story informed by Langan's knowledge of the horror genre and by his experiences in academia. It's a first-person tale within a frame -- a perennial structure in horror. It's a novel of academia. And its main narrator would seem utterly persuasive if it weren't for brief, gem-like moments throughout her narration that seem to highlight a pronounced lack of self-knowledge. Or do they?

Over the course of two long nights, SUNY-Huguenot graduate student and sessional instructor Veronica Croydon tells the story of her husband's mysterious disappearance to a narrator who seems to be John Langan. She does so because Langan writes horror stories and thus may be a good choice to hear the tale. During the day between the two nights, Langan and his wife discuss the possibility that he may also have been chosen for his perceived gullibility when it comes to the supernatural.

Veronica's narrative voice is sharp, self-assured, and intermittently unsympathetic. She's a great creation. Overall, her story of the supernatural seems convincing. It's the sudden revelations of a pronounced lack of self-evaluation spotted throughout the text that raise the possibility that her narration is flawed or possibly confabulated in its entirety. But these moments are few and far between, and subtle enough in most cases to sneak by.

Langan's depiction of academic life rings utterly true to this former academic. Veronica reminds me of a handful of graduate students I've known without in any way being a stereotype. The 40-years-older, married professor she herself marries within about a year of starting her graduate studies is also familiar without being a type. But we learn of him (and everything inside the frame) only from Veronica's point-of-view. Do we trust her? Do we trust any first-person narrator? Do we trust any narrator at all?

I don't know. In general, the discontinuities in the narrative include moments in which Veronica engages in stereotypical gender constructions of the male while at other points bristling at such constructions being attached to the female. She denigrates Herman Melville for being a detail-obsessed windbag while occasionally relating such a list of minutiae that the narrative almost bogs down in soporific descriptions of making dinner or sitting in a living room. She may have become her near-future husband's favourite student in the space of one class, with their out-of-class socializing beginning immediately thereafter, but she doesn't believe in being familiar with her own students. The failure of the earlier marriage was all the fault of the first wife -- but we learn of the first wife only through Veronica's narration. Well, we learn almost everything only through Veronica's narration. And a story that details the tragically flawed relationships of at least two sets of fathers and sons -- as commented upon throughout by Veronica -- also features Veronica's distant, annoyed relationship with a mother with whom she goes years between conversations. 

The major characters filling out the novel's pas de quatre are Ted, Roger's 30ish son from his previous marriage, and the house the Croydons have lived in for decades, Belvedere House. It's an old house. And it's about to become haunted. Or something.

Langan's vision of the supernatural in this novel bridges a gap between the cosmic, impersonal, non-traditional horrors of the Lovecraftian and the more traditional wonders and terrors of a ghost story, with psychology hanging over all. It helps to have read Fritz Leiber's great Our Lady of Darkness before reading his novel, but one doesn't need to: Langan lays everything out that the reader needs to know. Knowledge of the Leiber novel enriches one's enjoyment of House of Windows, though. And it's a swell novel.

As is this novel. The horrors here are both gross and subtle, supernatural and strictly human. There may not have ever been a haunting. But whether or not there was, there's a story of a haunting and the haunted -- there's horror and sorrow. Highly recommended.

Dead Travel Coach

Crimson Peak: written by Matthew Robins and Guillermo del Toro; directed by Guillermo del Toro; starring Mia Wasikowska (Edith Cushing), Jessica Chastain (Lucille Sharpe), Tom Hiddleston (Thomas Sharpe), Charlie Hunnam (Dr. McMichael), and Jim Beaver (Carter Cushing) (2015): Guillermo del Toro delivers a love letter to Edgar Allan Poe, Gothics, haunted houses, ghost stories, and the 1950's and 1960's horror movies of Hammer Studios and Roger Corman. Oh, and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Rebecca. "The Turn of the Screw." "The Beckoning Fair One." And a whole lot of others. Also, a guest appearance by Buffalo, New York. 

The production and costume design are extraordinary, colour-super-saturated in the manner of many of Corman's Poe adaptations while also supplying the requisite amount of decay and disintegration. Mia Wasikowska is solid as the late-19th-century American woman who chooses the wrong English guy, Tom Hiddleston conjures up some Vincent-Price-like morbid empathy as he plays that wrong guy, and Jessica Chastain is sinister and loopy as the wrong guy's sister. 

There are even elements of steam punk in Hiddleston's clay-digging machine, and a tribute to Sherlock Holmes (and creator Arthur Conan Doyle, fully name-checked in the narrative) in the person of Charlie Hunnam's opthamologist/ghost-hunter/amateur detective. 

There's nothing subtle about the movie -- it wears its metaphors on its brightly coloured sleeves. All this, and the ghosts -- as in the del Toro-produced Mama -- are stunningly creepy, a triumph of visual effects and the imagination of del Toro and his designers. This movie isn't for everybody. The build is just a tad slow in the first half, while in the second half del Toro pulls away from the cataclysmic finale antecedents such as "The Fall of the House of Usher" have primed us to expect. Highly recommended.

The Innocents: adapted from the Henry James novella "The Turn of the Screw" by John Mortimer, William Archibald, and Truman Capote; directed by Jack Clayton; starring Deborah Kerr (Miss Giddens), Megs Jenkins (Mrs. Grose), Martin Stephens (Miles), Pamela Franklin (Flora), Peter Wyngarde (Quint) and Clytie Jessop (Miss Jessel) (1961): Director Jack Clayton's adaptation of "The Turn of the Screw" is also an adaptation of a stage play based on "The Turn of the Screw." The play supplies many of our governess-protagonist's speeches, which Deborah Kerr pretty much nails -- though I'd always pictured Miss Giddens as being much younger than Kerr was at the time of her performance.

The set-up is simple and direct. A governess is hired to take care of the two orphaned charges of their uncle. They reside at a country estate. Miss Jessel, their previous governess, died under mysterious circumstances, as did the estate's head groundskeeper Mr. Quint. But the longer the governess stays at the estate, the more disturbing the circumstances become. The children begin to behave strangely once older brother Miles returns, expelled from boarding school for unnamed acts. The governess starts to see strange figures and hear strange noises. But the cook doesn't see or hear any of these things. The Uncle in London doesn't want to be bothered with anything to do with the children. The governess is in charge of the household. What will she do?

The movie doesn't really answer the faulty either/or binary posited in much of the 150 years of literary discussion about "The Turn of the Screw." Are ghosts haunting the governess' two young charges or is everything in her head? The movie, like the text itself, evades the binary and instead works best with both possibilities existing simultaneously. They're not mutually exclusive.

The Innocents manages to create a genuinely creepy atmosphere through direction, cinematography, sound, and the occasionally unnerving performances by the two child actors. There are a couple of 'Gotcha!' moments that involve the sudden appearance of a specter, but for the most part the movie relies on a gradual accumulation of distressing details.

Two changes from the original text limit some of the film's possibilities. "The Turn of the Screw" was told as a narration inside a narration decades after the events of the story; the movie omits this construction. James' original forces the reader to consider the fact that the governess went on being a governess for decades after the events of the story while also parenthesizing the entire story inside the governess' own telling of it, recounted to another person decades later. The movie also tries to be a bit more overt in explaining why Miles got expelled from boarding school, limiting the more unnerving possibilities of what Miles is capable of -- and of what Quint and Jessel subjected he and Flora to.

The whole thing works very well, though it is occasionally a bit mannered. Both the supernatural and the psychological work within the movie to gradually build a sense of dread. The acting is fine throughout, from the salt-of-the-Earth cook to Kerr's increasingly freaked-out governess to the two preternaturally coy and manipulative children. Highly recommended.

Re-Animator: adapted from the H.P. Lovecraft novella "Herbert West, Re-Animator" by Dennis Paoli, William Norris, and Stuart Gordon; directed by Stuart Gordon; starring Jeffrey Combs (Herbert West), Bruce Abbott (Dan Cain), Barbara Crampton (Megan Halsey), David Gale (Dr. Carl Hill), and Robert Sampson (Dean Halsey) (1985): Richard Band's score channels Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho as Vertigo-riffing opening credits zip by.  Then we get this weirdly faithfully unfaithful adaptation of a novella that H.P. Lovecraft essentially wrote on a dare and considered complete schlock uncharacteristic of all his other stories.

Schlock and grue and hyper-violence and nudity are all in writer-director Stuart Gordon's wheelhouse. Indeed, Re-Animator would help make his name and his studio's name as a creator of enjoyable, bloody, violent, witty, and low-budget horror movies. Gordon on less pulpy Lovecraft fare such as "Dagon" or "The Dreams in the Witch-House" -- not so good. Gordon on Re-Animator, From Beyond, or the Re-Animator sequels? Just fine.

I had forgotten the lamely acted romantic plot that weighs down parts of this movie. Really, I'd forgotten Bruce Abbott and Barbara Crampton, the ostensible leads of the movie, completely. Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West and David Gale as Dr. Carl Hill are the real stars, along with a whole lot of resurrected dead people, mobile body parts, and extremely angry resurrected cats. Gordon throws blood and guts around, but he does so with wit and a fair idea for what makes a horror movie gross and funny even as it occasionally verges on disturbing the viewer. I'll be damned if I completely understand part of the climax, though: sometimes a little exposition is a good idea.

Jeffrey Combs holds the screen whenever he's on it, which is never enough. He certainly captures the gonzo spirit of Lovecraft's obsessed Resurrection Man. And Gale is a hoot, never moreso than when he's menacing people while his head is separated from his body. The splatter effects are cheerfully bright, as is West's day-glo-green Resurrection Fluid: in reality, the liquid from inside a glowstick. Recommended.

Nightmare Downton Abbey

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (2009): The Little Stranger begins with a brief incident involving our narrator Faraday's visit as a boy to the English estate dubbed The Hundreds, just after the conclusion of World War One. The main part of the narrative takes place a couple of years after the conclusion of World War Two, still narrated by that boy who's now a country doctor in his childhood village in Warwickshire, an area in Central England half-way between London and Liverpool and just west of Birmingham, containing Stratford-Upon-Avon and Coventry. 

Dr. Faraday's mother worked at The Hundreds as a nursery attendant; his father was also a working man. They managed to put together enough money to put Faraday through good enough schools to get through to his M.D.. He has a lingering guilt over the idea that his parents' efforts on his behalf led to their early deaths. He also pointedly feels class snobbery throughout the novel, both generally and in his practice: he feels that he's at a disadvantage against his 'higher-born' colleagues when it comes to getting well-off clients.

As the main narrative begins, Faraday answers a call at The Hundreds. His colleague who normally handles medical problems at the estate is on another call. And so for the first time in 30 years, Faraday steps into what seems to have been a shining moment in his youth. However, what he finds is becoming more and more the normative in 20th-century England -- an estate and a family fallen on hard times and in the process of falling further as Clement Atlee's new Labour government sets higher taxes on the wealthy and the landed. 

Both the house and the grounds are falling into chaos and ruin. The Ayres family, longtime owners of The Hundreds, simply don't have the money to keep things running the way they ran during Faraday's boyhood visit. Faraday is appalled but charmed by the still-impressive mansion. He's been called to find out what's wrong with the Ayres' last full-time servant, a 14-year-old maid who's only been with them for a month or so.

Faraday quickly realizes that the maid is feigning illness. She's anxious over her feelings of isolation and loneliness, especially at night in the nearly deserted mansion as she sleeps a substantial distance away from anyone else. And she believes there's a malevolent ghost loose in The Hundreds. So it begins.

The novel takes cues from a number of the greatest hits of the horror genre. It's easy to see The Turn of the Screw in the setting of an underpopulated country house as seen and described with at least some unreliability by someone who isn't from England's upper class. The Hundreds is inhabited by a mother and her two grown children. The daughter is named Caroline, the son Roderick. So the novel nods to another waning family and decaying mansion in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." You know, with a major character named RODERICK Usher. Nudge, nudge.

Mainstream critics certainly seemed to twig to these well-known, canonical works in relation to Waters' novel. The novel's style certainly suggests neither Poe nor James. It's solid and workmanlike, and the accumulation of telling detail works throughout with the slowly turning screw of the plot so as to make The Little Stranger a terrific page-turner. That the novel crashes into the mountain and explodes over the last 20 pages is a shame, but what comes before is mostly excellent.

How does a ghost story get shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, as this novel was? Well, Waters was a well-regarded, mainstream novelist. The Little Stranger deals with Great Britain's still overwhelmingly class-oriented social system to the extent that the novel's ghostly, ghastly happenings all constellate around class consciousness, class resentment, and social change. People love class-related stuff, especially when it's set in the past and especially when there's decaying gentry and giant houses involved. It's Downton Nightmare Abbey.

Dr. Faraday will become increasingly entangled in the affairs of the Ayres family. He'll reveal through his narration his growing devotion to both them and their magnificently decaying estate. Bad things will happen with decreasingly believable rational explanations. Is there a ghost? Is Faraday becoming obsessed with The Hundreds over and above his concern for the people there? Will anyone call in a vicar or read a book about supernatural occurrences published in the 20th century? Is 'spinster' Caroline, perhaps 30, really a repressed lesbian? Will Basil Exposition show up?

Well, 'sort of' to that last question. Waters generally has a light hand with explanation and exposition. But the novel's favoured explanation of what's going on at The Hundreds is so odd that the two bouts of exposition that explain the concept aren't enough to suspend my disbelief. And I'm willing to believe an awful lot in the context of a ghost story. 

But what's required here isn't simply belief in a fairly dodgy concept that shows up in some explanations of poltergeist activity. It's belief in something that can reach across miles of distance, read minds, imitate a wide variety of sounds and voices, spontaneously start fires, write in some indelible way on walls, lift and throw heavy objects, control animals, and possibly apport objects from one location to another. It's not a poltergeist or a ghost -- it's the Swiss Army Knife of the spiritual world, with powers that would make for a pretty dangerous member of the X-Men.

Some of the problem springs from the fact that the supernatural explanation has to be fitted to the novel's exploration of class resentment. And ghosts and other supernatural forces have indeed often functioned as metaphorical explorations of real-world social and personal problems. But Waters' concept has so many moving parts! And it's so programmatic in relation to the sub-text it's illustrating! It's not too far removed from the Hyper-allegorical monsters of Edmund Spenser's The Fairie Queene. Especially Errour, who vomits evil books because dammit, I you will understand this point I'm making about erroneous interpretations of the Bible as set forth during the Great Pamphlet Wars.

And so The Little Stranger ends up stranded in a sort of metaphorical borderland between the two greatest English-language haunted-house novels of the 20th century, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Richard Matheson's Hell House. Jackson's novel leaves the reader in as much mystery at the end as it does at the beginning -- supernatural events have occurred, but it's difficult to see any meaning in them beyond the basic malign, and their mechanisms are never revealed. Hell House offers a pseudo-scientific explanation for its horrors, fully explained and reasoned through, and satisfying in a literary sense without destroying any of the horror that has preceded the final solution.

The Little Stranger stands between these two. There's still mystery at the end, but the novel has advanced a preferred or privileged explanation of the reasons and mechanisms of the haunting. But that explanation is too brief and patched together to seem convincing. 

The novel also falls away from the peaks of the haunted-house novel as a sub-genre because of an attribute it shares with many of Stephen King's novels: the dominance of the sub-text. The Shining is a haunted-house novel that has a very clear and intentional sub-text; it's the haunting as an elaborate metaphor for domestic abuse as perpetrated by an addictive personality under pressure. Obviously there are other things in there too, but the sub-text looms over the events in the Overlook Hotel. Similarly, The Little Stranger uses the supernatural to discuss issues of class and gender in England after World War Two (and, really, to the present day -- it's not like the gentry have gone away). 

But the aforementioned novels by Jackson and Matheson aren't about something other than the supernatural, at least not in the programmatic way that the Waters and King texts are. They're ultimately about the hauntings themselves, and how small groups of people deal with them. The Haunting of Hill House and Hell House engage fully with the Sublime and the mysterious. The Little Stranger does not -- nor does it seem to want to except in a couple of brief passages. As such, it's a finer novel involving class conflicts and social change than it is a ghost story. And there's certainly nothing wrong with that.

The Little Stranger is a heck of a ride, dense with period detail and blessed with a narrator who may be too sympathetic for the novel's own good. That he's unreliable and obsessive may or may not matter -- the novel certainly privileges one reading of the events over all others by the conclusion, but it doesn't seal off one's ability to read things in other ways. The major characters are all skillfully drawn, a period skillfully evoked, a disintegrating house skillfully drawn so as to almost become a character itself. Highly recommended.

This House is Haunted by John Boyne (2013)

This House is Haunted by John Boyne (2013): A quick look around the Internet shows how wildly divisive John Boyne's ghost story is, whether the reviewers are the denizens of Goodreads or singer Josh Ritter in the New York Times (seriously). I enjoyed the novel. Is it great? No. Was I entertained? Yes.

For all the novel's other influences, many of which it wears on its sleeve or perhaps even on its chest like sponsor logos on a NASCAR driver's chest, This House is Haunted really comes down to Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. This novel is almost programmatically the anti-matter opposite of James' famous (and famously ambivalent) ghost story. Boyne's set-up is very similar: a governess, two children (a girl and a boy), an absent guardian, and two ghosts.

How does it reverse James? Rather than a first-person narration nested inside a frame narration some fifty years after the events of the story, we instead get a first-person narrator still somehow in the thick of things. The girl is the older child, and the one most in peril from at least one spectral presence. The female ghost is the most dangerous one. The male ghost is benevolent. There's no coyness about whether or not a haunting is involved: from the title to the first overtly spectral act, there really is no doubt. This house really is haunted. Really, really haunted.

The choice of title -- a simple declarative sentence -- offers one of the interesting counterpoints to James' novella. James' chosen title has to be explained by the story itself for its true meaning to be understood. The screw that's being turned is the screw of suspenseful narrative, as discussed around a fireplace near the beginning of a novella. A ghost story with a child in peril represents an extra turn of the screw from a ghost story without an imperiled child. It's a title that springs from a discussion of narrative theory. Contrast this to 'This house is haunted.'

Further mirrored images proliferate. Certain signs and portents and bits of ghostly business dead-end, in opposition to the architectural tidiness of James' novella. The prose is mostly plain style, not Jamesian. While both the character and the works of Charles Dickens play a role in the novel, the prose is not "Dickensian," as some reviewers oddly claim.

What do you get? A fairly short ghost story set in 1867 England (London and Norfolk, to be exact), with a plucky governess, endangered children, family secrets, angry animals, and a lot of very physical ghost business. While The Turn of the Screw seems to be the primary mirror, the secondary homages and allusions are legion: Rebecca; Jane Eyre; A Christmas Carol; "The Fall of the House of Usher;" and The Uninvited are just a few. 

Moreover, This House is Haunted counters more than a century of somewhat misogynistic theorizing about the governess in The Turn of the Screw. Critics who claim that the ghosts in James' story are the products of the governess' mind have generally done so while claiming that this derangement is a sort of hallucination caused by sexual frustration linked to the governess' crush on the absent guardian of her two charges. This is both pretty sexist and psychologically loopy: scientifically speaking, people don't generally suffer from full-blown audio and visual hallucinations simply because they need to get laid.

Boyne's protagonist instead consciously and vocally fights against Victorian-era sexism at every turn. And a scene in which an unhelpful Anglican minister suggests to an enraged Eliza Caine that the ghosts are simply the product of the weak female mind strikes me as being a very direct rebuke to The Turn of the Screw's misogynistic interpreters.

Are there problems? A few. Anachronisms occasionally pop up in the language of the narrator. The loose ends may irritate readers who want everything in a story to be a version of Chekov's Gun. And the climax seems about 50% too cinematic, not so much a nod to "The Fall of the House of Usher" as a superhero battle between two invisible adversaries. The ghosts are almost absurdly powerful, though I do think that's part of the Mirror: Henry James' ghosts were almost entirely non-physical in their malign effects. For me, in any case, recommended with a few caveats. But I'll be damned if I understand how this novel made so many people so bloody angry.

Screwed

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898): One of the great horrors of a lot of first-year university English courses is The Turn of the Screw. It's really not something that should be inflicted on anyone below third-year English. And besides the complicated sentence structures of Henry James, there's a cruel tease in handing students a ghost story that's too attentuated to be viscerally scary.

So it goes. The striking things about the story have nothing to do with horror, and everything to do with a realistically imagined reaction to horror. It's one of the first psychological examinations of the workings of terror on the human mind. For actual scares, James' admirer Edith Wharton was much more forthright and reliable. Her ghosts stories would be fine first-year texts. James, not so much.

The distancing effects of the text play into its very title, which is, as explained in the story, a metaphoric description of the effects of a particular type of narrative, the ghost story itself. In the narrative, the revelation of the events of the story of the governess comes as a result of a bout of fireside ghost-story telling. The typical ghost story elicits certain reactions: to imperil children in such a story represents a further "turn of the screw" to increase the emotional and horrific "pressure" on the audience.

The two schools of thought on The Turn of the Screw roughly divide up into 'There are ghosts' and 'there are no ghosts.' The latter requires narrative duplicity on the level of The Usual Suspects: pretty much everything in the main part of the story that describes the struggle between a young governess and two malign ghosts for the souls of her two young charges must either be confabulation on the part of the governess or, at a further remove, confabulation on the part of the frame character who has ostensibly set down her narrative.

The former requires suspension of disbelief, something the average reader will accept but that many academics are incapable of accepting. There are no ghosts in the real world; hence, the ghosts in James' story must be fiction. If there are ghosts, though, what then? We know they did something to the young girl and young boy when they were still alive. What?

James isn't necessarily going to answer such questions. There's a reticence born of his own sensibilities and the sensibilities of the time. That reticence occurs within the story-world as well: the governess is at all points constrained by what is or is not proper to talk about, by what is or is not mentionable in polite company. Within that story-world in which there are malign ghosts, propriety allows those ghosts much more free rein than they might have in other circumstances.

But the genius of the story lies in the aforementioned psychological examination of the effects of terror on a human mind. The governess' mind must circle, returning again and again to its own reactions to things others cannot see, forced to deal again and again with feelings of horror the source of which only she seems to see. How much do the children see? How many of the children's actions constitute clever play-acting? What do the ghosts want now?

Around and around we go. The chills here are almost entirely of a philosophical or existential nature: how does the mind in isolation react to that which should not be? How can action be taken against incorporeal beings that never really act against one, but instead appear and disappear, trailing clouds of malevolence? How complicit is the governess in what happens? And why does she write exactly like Henry James? Highly recommended.