American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction

Preface

PREFACE This book grows out of a misspent youth-a twenty-plus-year loveaffair with the macabre begun during clandestine raids on my eldest sister's tattered collection of Stephen King paperbacks, confirmed by late-show reruns of Hammer's classic horror films of the fifties and sixties , and perpetuated through a junior high and high school career that found me stepping out on the assigned classics (Don Quixote and A Tale ofTwo Cities in eighth-grade English) with Robert R. McCammon, Dean Koontz, and Anne Rice. College blessed me with teachers who enabled me to see the connections between "that horror trash" (as one highschool teacher memorably dismissed it) and the grand traditions of English and American literature. By the time I reached graduate school, my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction was drawing to an end, and I had begun to sell my own forays into that horror trash (not to mention that fantasy and science fiction garbage) with satisfying regularity. Such is the long foreground of American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction, and in that abbreviated personal history we can find some account of its eccentricities. Conceived as an expression of my life-long romance with the macabre, this book explores a sub-genre of horror fiction for which I feel particular affection: the haunted house tale. As I re-read these stories, I realized that popular fiction of the last fifty years has seen the development of a uniquely American haunted house formula which finds its roots in the gothic tradition, especially the works of Poe and Hawthorne, and which should be distinguished from the ghost story as practiced by Henry James, Edith Wharton, and others. I also came to believe that the popularity of that formula depended upon its versatility in exploring American themes. In the following study, I hope to describe that formula and explain its continued success through investigation of a limited, but, I believe, representative selection of texts-including some of the very novels which I first read as hijacked paperbacks secreted inside my eighth-grade English book. In re-examining the tales I loved as a kid through the eyes of an adult trained as an academic critic, I frequently found it useful to cite traditional scholarship; however, as I wrote, I also found that I could not ignore the experience of the child wh~to borrow a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut-began this duty dance with death. This book is more than a critical exercise; it is a memoir and a love letter to ix x American Nightmares the books that shaped me as a boy, and the boy, like the man he has become, will have his say. Caveat lector: this book was not intended-and should not be read-as a history of the gothic tradition or a survey of contemporary horror fiction. Those fields have been tilled by hands far more expert than my own.I Rather, my intention was to isolate a single formula-a sub-genre--of American horror, and to explain its popularity in the contexts of its cultural milieu and its antecedents in gothic literature. To that end, I've often imbedded my discussion in close textual readings, highlighting the formula's affinities with a variety of American anxieties and themes. The first two chapters take up the origins of the haunted house tale, tracing its roots not only to the gothic traditions of England and America , but to a history of social criticism which symbolically identifies the house with American ideologies. Chapter 3 extends that development into the twentieth century, focusing on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, which stands halfway between the psychological ghost story, with its emphasis on ambiguity and narrative uncertainty, and the contemporary haunted house formula as it took shape in the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter 4 outlines the dimensions and popularity of that formula through two related works: Jay Anson's 1977 bestseller, The Amityville Horror, filmed in 1979, perhaps the most famous and among the most conventional of contemporary haunted house tales; and comedian Eddie Murphy's critique of the film in his 1983 stand-up concert, Delirious. Chapters 5 and 6 examine three significant haunted house tales of the last thirty years-Robert Marasco's Burnt Offerings, Anne Rivers Siddons 's The House Next Door, and Stephen King's The Shining. Chapter 7 concludes with a brief survey of directions the American haunted house tale might take in the...