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5 MIDDLE-CLASS NIGHTMARES: ROBERT MARASCO'S BURNT OFFERINGS AND ANNE RNERS SIDDONS'S THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR I. Jay Anson wasn't the first writer to employ the haunted house as a symbol of the sometimes grim economic realities of American life. Hawthorne touched upon the idea in The House of the Seven Gablesremember that grim little shop Hepzibah opens up to make ends meet?and Robert Marasco's Burnt Offerings, published in 1973 and adapted for the screen in 1976, takes the notion as its exclusive province. Infinitely more original than Amityville in its deployment of the haunted house formula, Marasco's book bears comparison with The House Next Door, a very fine haunted house novel published in 1978, a year after Amityville made its debut.I Adhering to the injunction of Horace (dulce et utile) and dog-owners everywhere, Marasco and Siddons both instruct and entertain, concealing bitter doses of social criticism in the tasty hamburger of popular fiction. They subvert the conventions of the haunted house formula to probe the moral and spiritual corruption of its middleclass consumers. Additionally, their novels-subtle but not impenetrable, thematic but not polemical-provide a lens through which to examine the paperback formula of the haunted house tale as manipulated by writers striving to meet the conflicting expectations of a mass audience. As we've seen, that audience often demands both the security of the familiar and the novel stimuli of innovation-"the same but different" in the language of publishers and producers, all in a single neat package if possible . It's not easy, as the legions of failed Stephen King and John Grisham imitators can attest. But who ever said popular fiction was easy? 2. Probably not Robert Marasco. Born in the Bronx in 1936, Marasco graduated from Fordham University and later returned to his high school alma mater, the Jesuit Regis High School in Manhattan, as a teacher of classics. His nine-year tenure 67 68 American Nightmares there provided material for his first success as a writer, the 1970 Broadway production of Child's Play, a gothic murder mystery set in a Catholic boarding school. Child's Play was an immediate success, winning good reviews, a New York Drama Critics's Citation naming Marasco the year's most promising new playwright, and five Tony Awards. In a Newsweek review of the play, Marasco reported that his next project was a screenplay called Burnt Offerings (Keneas 78), but that effort first bore fruit as a novel in 1973, only seeing cinematic production three years later as a vehicle starring Oliver Reed, Karen Black, and Lee Harcourt Montgomery as the embattled family central to the haunted house formula. Though that novel enjoyed modest success, Marasco did not publish another book until 1979's Parlor Games, an account of an incestuous love triangle that ends in murder. He has since fallen silent, his initial success as a popular novelist having evaporated.2 As Fitzgerald said, there are no second acts in American lives. And yet, the novel, Burnt Offerings, remains modestly well-known twenty-four years later. Initial reviews were sparse, as is usually the case with genre novels that rely heavily on formula. Serious critics mostly ignored the book, though the New York Times Book Review dismissed it in a brief (generally acerbic) notice as a "horrorama" (Levin 40). The New York Times, on the other hand, praised the book for providing its readers a "deliciously awful time" (Lehmann-Haupt 37). Other reviewers struck the same notes; popular publications generally praised the novel's suspense and more serious reviewers occasionally weighed in to condemn it as formulaic pabulum, with Booklist alone claiming to discover any significance in the tale and that only a "suggestion" (673).3 The years have been kinder to Burnt Offerings than the New York Times Book Review was. In 1993, Buccaneer reprinted the novel in hardback , and genre aficionados remember it fondly. Stephen King listed it among the most important contributions to contemporary horror in Danse Macabre, his 1981 study of the field; Stephen Jones and Kim Newman include it in their 1988 survey, Horror: 100 Best Books; and in Neil Barron's 1990 overview, Horror Literature: A Reader's Guide, Bentley Little praises the novel as "influential" in its manipulation of genre conventions (279-80). Little's point is well-taken: Marasco understands the haunted house formula and manipulates it with some sophistication , especially late in the novel. As we will see, however...

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