There Have Always Been Haunted Houses

On the heels of their collection The Weird Cat, S.T. Joshi and Katherine Kerestman have assembled a new anthology, Shunned Houses, presenting stories and poems from the age of Pliny the Younger to the present. The format is similar and the volumes have contributors in common, but the experience of reading this volume is as bracingly creepy as that feeling when a door you have carelessly let close behind you locks itself.

Why does the material seem perennially fresh? As Joshi and Kerestman write in their introduction, “Not merely backdrops contributing to atmosphere and setting, houses often carry the burdens of past hopes and dread, death and misdeeds.” They go on to describe shunned houses as portals through which we can revisit the past.

The editors have said it well. The characters in the stories and poems collected here may wander blindly and end up against their will in a shunned house, but it is hard to rule out the question of any agency on their part. At the back of their minds, an impulse flickers to see what lies hidden in the depths of a place that they know, in the full light of reason, they should avoid. They owe it to themselves. A past, often their past, lies inside, and a reckoning with it is unavoidable.

It may also be helpful to quote the line from H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep” that appears at the top of Tony LaMalfa’s entry, “The Red Ensign.”

“There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through,” Lovecraft wrote.

This truth is on display in “The Red Ensign,” whose author LaMalfa—a contributor to The Weird Cat—is emerging as an original and promising voice in horror fiction. The new story is about a veteran of the Great War who travels widely with another former soldier whose life he saved on the front, and seeks lodging in the eponymous building, a former farmhouse turned boardinghouse. He decides to spend the night there despite an odor of overcooked cabbage, rumors of a terrible accident in the past, and a general air of creepiness and desolation. It is there that a woman (or is she a woman?) named Jezebel Rhodes reenters his life after many years. He describes her as a temptress with “a leathery hand stained with a rich burgundy,” “honey-brown hair and baby-blue eyes.”

To reveal more of the plot here would be a crime. But the meeting with Jezebel in this strange venue calls to mind lines from Ted Hughes’s immortal 1957 poem, “The Horses”: “In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the faces / May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place.”

What LaMalfa presents here is not so much the return of the repressed as a return to the repressed. On some level, his narrator wants to meet Jezebel Rhodes again, and this illicit, deeply buried desire holds the key to understanding why characters in such stories at times do exasperatingly counterintuitive things and why the reckoning at the end of this type of tale has an air of inevitability, of facing the answer to the riddle of your existence. This inversion of motive makes haunted house stories so much more powerful and resonant than yarns about werewolves or vampires or living dead that chase us.

The volume offers no clearer illustration of its editors’ theme than John Shirley’s “Empty Bottles,” in which a young man visits the crumbling home where his father lives with his half-siblings. The visitor and his mother tried to alert the father to the visit by sending a letter, but the protagonist finds it, yellowing and unopened, on the front porch. Upon his arrival, he discovers a dysfunctional semi-family that cannot get away from WiFi and earphones long enough to engage with the world or pursue any line of thought. As the story progresses, we learn that these slaves to the drug that current technologies hold out are victims of a haunting—and their own souls are doing it to them.

Here again, as Joshi and Kerestman have observed, it is impossible to separate what happens to the narrator from his own desires to catch up with pieces of his past and identity that he cannot forswear. The same is true of the narrator of W.W. Jacobs’s “Three at Table.” This tale presents the trope of a wanderer seeking refuge against his better judgment in a dark house. He knocks on the door and a kindly but odd elderly couple invite him in. He then finds himself standing in the front hall. Maybe he did not want to enter, but for him to have come in against his will, without any coercion or accident, of course is a logical impossibility.

Readers familiar with Jacobs’s widely anthologized “The Monkey’s Paw” will spot a similar element in the plot of “Three at Table,” at whose climax the visitor sits down with the couple and their son, who got disfigured in a horrible accident years before, joins them. This is a ghost story. Even with the visitor, the husband and wife, and the son seated, there are only three at table.

Invention is a hallmark of the works in Shunned Houses. In Algernon Blackwood’s “The Midnight Hour,” the protagonist relates a tale from a much different time of life, “the distant days when I was so eager to see a ghost with my own eyes.” Blackwood has described an impulse that would drive the characters in many stories of haunted houses to follow in later years.

The Psychical Research Society advises the narrator of an unfurnished dwelling in Brighton where a manservant once pushed a housemaid over a banister to her death. He gets his hands on the keys and finds a curious woman to explore the house with him, and things get spooky fast, but Blackwood leaves the nature of the haunting ambiguous. As fear sets in, the features of the woman appear to turn much younger. “It was the face of a girl, lines and wrinkles all ironed out,” the narrator tells us. Whether to put this down to the effects of shock, as Blackwood’s protagonist has learned from a Rudyard Kipling story to do, or attribute it to a less conventionally scientific phenomenon is up to the reader.

Ramsey Campbell’s “Napier Court” is another U.K.-set tale of a haunting in a grand and ornate home. You might ask whether it would not be suitable to discuss Campbell alongside the other contemporaries discussed in this review, but the literate and subtle Campbell has fully earned his place alongside Jacobs, Blackwood, and the other greatest spinners of weird tales.

Alma Napier, who struggles with depression following the end of a relationship with a man named Peter, lives in a big house whose former owner lost all his money on the stock market and gassed himself to death. In this sly interplay of mists and echoes and mirrors, Alma becomes the victim of more than one type of haunting. Campbell returns repeatedly to a telling detail. Alma is reading Eugene Ionesco’s play Victimes du Devoir, which takes up in a playful and semisurrealist manner the themes of dissociative identity and fragmented selves. The play is a microcosm of the Alma’s turmoil, and, as the story progresses, the astute reader may come to view the protagonist herself as the living and breathing adumbration of the larger assault on received notions of reality that Napier Court represents.

This is a tiny sampling of the contents of a volume whose other haunters include Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Guy de Maupassant, and such contemporaries as Anna Taborska, Ann K. Schwader, Jonathan Thomas, Kyla Lee Ward, and Katherine Kerestman.

In the history of literature, some ages stand out for their comedies of manners, or Gothic romances, or imperialist adventure yarns, or noir thrillers, or existentialist road travelogues, or tales of disaffected and spoiled urban youth. Tastes are fickle and fashions come and go. But the remote house where bizarre dangers lurk is one of those tropes that turn up in no matter what age or part of the world you choose to study. It is a timeless genre.