When Homes Go Bad
A deep dive into a certain type of hostile architecture. Plus, horror news!
Hello again, my creepy friends :)
My life kind of went sideways last month for obvious reasons, but I am back and grappling my way toward a new normal (and familiar rhythms). Thank you for al the kind words about my dad, and also for all the support for Neverest during its launch. Birthing a book out into the world while having a funeral and juggling family and work and all the rest is a teeny tiny bit stressful, but y’all showed up and made it a lot less-bad. So, thank you!
Also, if you haven’t picked up your copy yet, there is no time like the present: https://www.amazon.com/Neverest-T-L-Bodine-ebook/dp/B0BRJGLSDK
Weird Little Words is a new pub looking for horror, adventure, sci-fi, etc. from diverse voices. Check out their open calls: https://weirdlittleworlds.com/submissions/
Atomic Carnival Books hit its first Kickstarter, which means now the fun can REALLY begin. Keep this one on your radar, folks, these collections are going to be awesome:
Did you know Hailey Piper wrote a sequel to The Worm and His King? No? Well, she did, and you should go buy Even The Worm Will Turn now: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BWT42MJG
With Twitter being a slow-burning dumpster fire, it’s getting harder and harder to keep up with horror news from my other small creatives. So, if you want me to shout out what you’re up to, drop me a message, will ya?
My book club theme for May is “books in translation” and I must confess that I am not at all prepared for it -_-
I only finished 1 of the 3 books I started reading in April, and I failed to make a book haul or library run in advance for May so…woops. However! A friend of mine does have a whole shelf of books in translation, so I asked her to pick stuff out for me.
What are YOU reading this month?
Generally speaking, there are two ways a house can be haunted.
It can be home to some malevolent entity or restless spirit. Perhaps its walls have borne witness to a horrifying tragedy or act of unfairness. Perhaps it has suffered from the weight of the supernatural load it bears, or maybe it's just very old. Regardless -- once the spirit is laid to rest, the house has at least some chance of becoming a peaceful home once again.
But sometimes the house itself is bad. Sometimes the evilness seeps right into the foundations, permeates the boards and planks. Sometimes houses have minds and desires and impulses of their own...and sometimes those desires are unfriendly, even hostile.
Let's talk about that second type.
Whatever Walks There, Walks Alone
In the oft-repeated and admired opening to her novel The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson writes:
“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 nearly, 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.”
Hill House serves as the ur-example of the "sapient home" trope in most discussions. To be sure, there have been earlier smart houses, like the literally-alive fairytale dwelling of Baba Yaga. And an argument could be made for the sentience of Poe's House of Usher. But it's not until Hill House that house-as-character really seems to implant in the collective imagination.
But as compelling as it is to read Jackson's story about a house with evil designs, I think that may be a bit of a mischaracterization of the text. I think the heart of Jackson's story (if not all of its adaptations) is that the house is not haunted at all; the people who come to it are, and by putting them all together in one place and feeding into their madness, they manifest something.
Besides -- there are more explicit sapient houses to consider.
A Round-Up of Vicious Real Estate
Although it's never explicitly stated, this year's break-out experimental indie film Skinamarink certainly fits within the hostile architecture genre. Here we are introduced to two small children who awaken to find their father missing and their house rendered alien and unfriendly. Doors and toilets disappear. Televisions play unnerving sections of cartoons on repeat. A disembodied voice makes threats. And all the while, we as viewers are treated to a home filmed specifically to be unnerving -- tilted angles, endless hallways, toys made sinister by the play of light and shadow.
Viewers liken it to Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, where the most seemingly innocuous feature -- a house that's just barely larger inside than out -- unfolds into a multi-layered saga of horror. In that way, it shares DNA with H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dreams in the Witch House," where a room's unearthly geometry opens it as a portal to a darker world.
Sometimes hostile homes are more overt in their malevolence. Consider the titular Monster House, a film where a house comes alive to become an entire digestive system for curious children. Other homes lure you in with sweet promises before becoming more sinister, like Clive Barker's Holiday House in The Thief of Always.
Often, it's ambiguous whether the house is truly evil or if it's just the troubled mind of its occupants manifesting malevolence. That's true of Jackson's Hill House, and it's doubly true for King's Overlook Hotel in The Shining, where the ghosts are so thick and time is so slippery that it's hard to gauge just how much is bona-fide haunting, how much is madness, and how much is a building utterly shot through with decay.
But sometimes, the house is more overt in its machinations. Consider for example Brian Asman's amusingly titled Man, Fuck This House, where the family home is a little too eager to answer the prayers of the people inside. Compare and contrast with the 1976 film Burnt Offerings, based on a novel of the same name by Robert Marasco, where a home's renovations are literally paid in blood. Or see Kim Newman's An English Ghost Story for a different take on a house getting in the middle of a family's business.
There's often a consumerist or classist angle to these house-horrors, particularly when the home is grander or more expensive than a character's social station would allow. "You can have this nice house," these tales may sneer. "But it will come at a price you might not be willing to pay."
Then again, sapient houses of horror can also serve as metaphors for other types of social and racial tensions. In Philip Sevy's comic The House, a house appears as a refuge for soldiers at the Battle of the Bulge, only to become a labyrinthine horror once they go inside. Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching uses the hostile home as a vehicle for considering race and family legacy. And the entire notion of the haunted house is subverted masterfully in the immigrant horror of Netflix's His House, where government housing becomes a site of inescapable horror.
Beware the House that Feels
In her essay "Beware the House that Feels," Ashley starling writes, "Metaphorically, a home is typically associated with feelings of comfort, security, and everyday functions. It is the base of family life, the safe haven from the evils of the outside world. Yet this place of domesticity supports an atmosphere that is ripe for malicious intrusion."
As we discussed before in our Gothic Incest piece (and way back, when we talked about unwelcome house guests in Mother! and Parasite), "the home" in horror is frequently a stand-in not just for family, but for society at large. The home is a microcosm of society, and when something goes awry out in the world, it will be felt in the home.
I feel there's been a resurgence of hostile homes in fiction over the past couple decades. And from where I'm standing, it makes sense.
For a house to be properly haunted, ghosts and all, it needs a history. And our modern world, generally bereft of multigenerational housing and (for most of us) generational wealth, doesn't afford many opportunities to imbue a home with history.
Someone might have died in the house I move into, but that's not got much to do with me. I'm not likely to uncover a lot of family secrets in my overpriced condo. Houses are no longer the seat of our history but instead the face of our future. They are aspirational. They can be money pits that trap you in debt and endless repairs. And, if you fail to appease them (ie, make your mortgage payments), you're bound to face a certain kind of wrath.
There's something else at work, too, more existential and less literal. I'd argue that as our society becomes increasingly secular, we're less concerned with the afterlife, less unnerved by restless spirits. But at the same time, we're increasingly at the mercy of inhuman intelligence guiding different aspects of our lives.
We have algorithms that can accurately guess our behaviors and desires, self-driving cars, robots that sweep our floors, digital assistants who listen for commands. We have more reason than ever to worry about what happens if the innocuous, inhuman items around us suddenly rise from their slumber and seek to oppress us.
And if we can't trust our own homes -- the places where we sleep and eat and whisper our darkest secrets -- what can we trust?