American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction

157 Pages·1999·8.501 MB·English

by  Dale Bailey

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The University of Wisconsin Press
The University of Wisconsin Press
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Copyright © 1999
Bowling Green State University Popular Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the
Internet or a website without written permission of the
University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief
quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bailey, Dale.
American nightmares : the haunted house formula in American
popular fiction I Dale Bailey.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-87972-789-6 (clothbound). -- ISBN 0-87972-790-X (pbk.)
1. American fiction--History and criticism. 2. Haunted houses in
literature. 3. Popular literature--United States--History and criticism.
4. National characteristics, American, in literature. 5. Ghost stories,
American-History and criticism. 6. Horror tales, American--History
and criticism. 7. Nightmares in literature. 8. Home in literature.
I. Title.
PS374Ji33B35 1999
813.009'355-dc21 98-49557
CIP
Cover design by Dumm Art
ISBN 978-0-87972-790-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)
Jean
Light in haunted places
Maybe this is the wave of the future. It isn't the thing that goes
bump in your house in the night that is going to do you in in this brave
new world; it's your house itself. In a world where the very furniture of
your life, the basic bones of your existence, turn terrible and strange,
perhaps the only thing we're going to have to fall back on is whatever
innate decency we can find deep within ourselves.
-Anne Rivers Siddons
Quoted in Stephen King's Danse Macabre
CONTENTS
Preface IX
1 Welcome to the Funhouse:
Gothic and the Architecture of Subversion 1
2 The Sentient House and the Ghostly Tradition:
The Legacy of Poe and Hawthorne 15
3 June Cleaver in the House of Horrors:
Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House 25
4 "Too bad we can't stay, baby!":
The Horror at Amityville 47
5 Middle-Class Nightmares:
Robert Marasco's Burnt Offerings and
Anne Rivers Siddons's The House Next Door 67
6 Unmanned by the American Dream:
Stephen King's The Shining 91
7 Ghosts in the Machine:
The Future of the Haunted House Formula 107
Notes 115
Works Cited 125
Index 137

PREFACE
This book grows out of a misspent youth-a twenty-plus-year love
affair 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 six
ties, and perpetuated through a junior high and high school career that
found me stepping out on the assigned classics (Don Quixote and A Tale
of Two 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 high
school teacher memorably dismissed it) and the grand traditions of Eng
lish 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. Con
ceived 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 popu
larity of that formula depended upon its versatility in exploring Ameri
can 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