Danse Macabre

by Stephen King

  "On its simplest level, I think it works well as a piece of horror fiction that depends on the juxtaposition of the unimaginably terrible with the utterly ordinary . . . the wonderful Henry James 'terror in sunlight' syndrome. Rosemary's Baby is the absolute master of this particular device, and it was that quality, in part, that I strove for. I also feel good about the fact that, to me, all the characters are still extremely sympathetic people, even this long after writing and after this many rereadings. I cared very much what happened to them as I unveiled them on the pages, and I still care about them.

  "Maybe it succeeds, too, in being an utterly contemporary horror tale. 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. In a way, I do not think this is a bad thing."

  A phrase that stands out in Siddons's analysis of her own work--at least it stands out to me--is this one: ". . . to me there was very real gallantry," she says, "in the fact that they knew this themselves, and went ahead anyway . . ." We might think of this as a uniquely Southern sentiment, and as ladylike as she is, Anne Rivers Siddons is squarely in a Southern tradition of gothic writers.

  She tells us she has jettisoned the ruins of the antebellum plantation, and so she has, but in a wider sense, The House Next Door is very much the same spooky, tumble-down plantation home where writers as seemingly disparate but as essentially similar as William Faulkner, Harry Crews, and Flannery O'Connor--probably the greatest American short-story writer of the postwar era--have lived before her. It is a home where even such a really gruesomely bad writer as William Bradford Huie has rented space from time to time.

  If the Southern experience were to be viewed as unfilled soil, then we would have to say that almost any writer, no matter how good or bad, who deeply feels that Southern experience could plant a seed and have it grow--as an example I recommend Thomas Cullinan's novel The Beguiled (made into a good Clint Eastwood film, directed by Don Siegel). Here is a novel which is "written pretty good," as a friend of mine likes to put it--meaning, of course, nuthin' special. No Saul Bellow, no Bernard Malamud, but at least not down there in steerage with people like Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon, who apparently wouldn't know the difference between a balanced line of prose and a shit-and-anchovy pizza. If Cullinan had elected to write a more conventional novel, it would stick out in no one's mind. Instead, he came up with this mad gothic tale about a Union soldier who loses his legs and then his life to the deadly angels of mercy who dwell in a ruined girls' school that has been left behind in Sherman's march to the sea. This is Cullinan's little acre of that patch of unfilled soil, soil which has always been amazingly rich. One is tempted to believe that outside of the South, such an idea wouldn't raise much more than ragweed. But in this soil, it grows a vine of potent, crazed beauty--the reader is mesmerized with horror by what goes on in that forgotten school for young ladies.

  On the other hand, William Faulkner did more than drop a few seeds; he planted the whole damn garden . . . and everything he turned his hand to after 1930, when he really discovered the gothic form for fair, seemed to come up. The essence of the Southern gothic in Faulkner's work comes, for me, in Sanctuary, when Popeye stands on the scaffold, about to be hanged. He has combed his hair neatly for the occasion, but now, with the rope around his neck and his hands tied behind his back, his hair has fallen lankly across his forehead. He begins to jerk his head, trying to flip his hair back into place. "I'll fix that for you," the executioner tells him, and pulls the trigger on the scaffold's trapdoor. Exit Popeye, with hair in his face. I believe with all my heart that no one brought up north of the Mason-Dixon Line could have thought of that scene, or written it right if he or she had done. Ditto the long, lurid, and excruciating scene in the doctor's waiting room which opens Flannery O'Connor's novella "Revelation." There are no doctor's waiting rooms like that outside the Southern imagination; holy Jesus, what a crew.

  My point is that there is something frighteningly lush and fertile in the Southern imagination, and this seems particularly so when it turns into the gothic channel.

  The case of the Harralsons, the first family to inhabit the Bad Place in Siddons's novel shows quite clearly how the author has put her own Southern gothic imagination to work. Pie Harralson, the girl-wife-Chi-Omega-Junior-Leaguer, wields an unhealthy sort of attraction over her father, a beefy, choleric man from the "wire grass south." Pie seems quite aware that her husband, Buddy, makes a triangle with her at the apex and daddy at one of the lower corners. She plays the two of them off one another. The house itself is only another pawn in the love-hate-love affairs she seems to be having with her father ("That weird thing she has with him," one character says dismissively). Near the end of her first conversation with Colquitt and Walter, Pie says gleefully: "Oh, Daddy's just going to hate this house! Oh, he's going to be fit to be tied!"

  Buddy, meanwhile, has been taken under the wing of Lucas Abbott, a new arrival at the law office where Buddy works. Abbott is a Northerner, and we hear passingly that Abbott left New York as the result of a scandal: ". . . something about a law clerk."

  The house next door, which turns people's own deepest weaknesses against them, as Siddons says, fuses these elements neatly and horribly. Near the end of the housewarming party, Pie begins to scream. The guests rush to see what has happened to her. They find Buddy Harralson and Lucas Abbott embracing, naked, in the bedroom where the coats have been left. Pie's Daddy has found them first, and he is in the process of expiring of a stroke on the floor while his Punkin Pie screams on . . . and on . . . and on.

  Now if that isn't Southern gothic, what is?

  The essence of the horror in this scene (which for some reason reminds me strongly of that heart-stopping moment in Rebecca where the nameless narrator stops the party cold by floating down the stairs in the costume also worn by Maxim's dreadful first wife) lies in the fact that social codes have not merely been breached; they have been exploded in our shocked faces. Siddons pulls this particular dynamite blast off perfectly. It is a case of everything going just about as totally wrong as things can go; lives and careers are ruined irrevocably in a passage of seconds.

  We need not analyze the psyche of the horror writer; nothing is so boring or so annoying as people who ask things like, "Why are you so weird?" or "Was your mother scared by a two-headed dog while you were in utero?" Nor am I going to do that here, but I'll point out that much of the walloping effect of The House Next Door comes from its author's nice grasp of social boundaries. Any writer of the horror tale has a clear--perhaps even a morbidly overdeveloped--conception of where the country of the socially (or morally, or psychologically) acceptable ends and that great white space of Taboo begins. Siddons is better at marking the edges of the socially acceptable from the socially nightmarish than most (although Daphne Du Maurier comes to mind again), and I'll bet that she was taught young that you don't eat with your elbows on the table . . . or make abnormal love in the coatroom.

  She returns to the breach of social codes again and again (as she does in an earlier, nonsupernatural novel about the south, Heartbreak Hotel), and on its most rational, symbolic level, The House Next Door can be read as a funny-horrible sociological treatise on the mores and folkways of the Modestly Suburban Rich. But beneath this, the heart of the Southern gothic beats strongly. Colquitt tells us she could not bear to tell her closest friend what she saw on the day when Anita Sheehan finally and irrevocably lost her mind, but she is able to tell us in vivid, shocking detail. Horrified or not, Colquitt saw it all. She herself makes a "New South/Old South" comparison near the beginning of the novel, and the novel taken as a whole is another. On the surface we see "the obligatory tobacco-brown Mercedeses," vacations at Ocho Rios, Bloody M
arys sprinkled thickly with fresh dill at Rinaldi's. But the stuff underneath, the stuff which makes the heart of this novel pulse with such a tremendous crude strength, is the Old South--the Southern gothic stuff. Underneath, The House Next Door is not situated in a tony Atlanta suburb at all; it is located in that grimly grotty country of the heart that Flannery O'Connor mapped so well. Scratch Colquitt Kennedy deeply enough and we find O'Connor's Mrs. Turpin, standing in her pigpen and waiting for a revelation.

  If the book has a serious problem, it lies in our perception of Walter, Colquitt, and the third major character, Virginia Guthrie. Our feelings about these characters are not particularly sympathetic, and while it is not a rule that they should be, the reader may find it hard to understand why Siddons likes them, as she says she does. Through most of the book, Colquitt herself is particularly unappetizing: vain, class-conscious, money-conscious, sexually priggish, and vaguely exhibitionistic at the same time. "We like our lives and our possessions to run smoothly," she tells the reader with a maddening complacency early on. "Chaos, violence, disorder, mindlessness all upset us. They do not frighten us, precisely, because we are aware of them. We watch the news, we are active in our own brand of rather liberal politics. We know we have built a shell for ourselves, but we have worked hard for the means to do it; we have chosen it. Surely we have the right to do that."

  In all fairness, part of this is meant to set us up for the changes that Colquitt and Walter undergo as a result of the supernatural didoes next door--that damned house is doing what Bob Dylan called bringing it all back home. Siddons undoubtedly means to tell us that the Kennedys eventually arrive at a new plateau of social consciousness; after the episode with the Sheehans, Colquitt tells her husband: "You know, Walter, we've never stuck our necks out. We've never put ourselves or anything we really value on the line. We've taken the best life has to give . . . and we really haven't given anything back." If this is so, then Siddons succeeds. The Kennedys pay with their lives. The novel's problem may be that the reader is apt to feel that the dues paid were fair ones.

  Siddons's own view on just what the Kennedys' rising social consciousness means is also muddier than I would like. If it is a victory, it seems to be of the Pyrrhic variety; their world has been destroyed by their conviction that they must warn the world against the house next door, but their conviction seems to have given them remarkably little inner peace in return--and the book's kicker seems to indicate that their victory has a decidedly hollow ring.

  Colquitt does not just put on her sun hat when she goes to do the garden; she puts on her Mexican sun hat. She is justly proud of her job, but the reader may feel a bit more uneasy about her serene confidence in her own looks: "I have what I want and do not need the adulation of very young men, even though, I modestly admit, there have been some around my agency who have offered it." We know that she looks good in tight jeans; Colquitt herself helpfully points this out. We have the feeling that if the book had been written a year or two later, Colquitt would be pointing out that she looks good in her Calvin Klein jeans. The point of all this is that she's not a character most people will be able to hope for easily, and whether or not her personal tics help or hinder in the book's steady, downturning funnel toward disaster is something that the reader will have to decide for herself or himself.

  Equally problematic is the book's dialogue. At one point Colquitt hugs the newly arrived Anita Sheehan and tells her, "Welcome to the neighborhood once again, Anita Sheehan. Because you're a whole new lady and one I like immensely, and I hope you're going to be very, very happy here." I don't quibble with the sentiment; I just wonder if people, even in the South, really talk like this.

  Let's say this: the major problem with The House Next Door is the muddiness of character development. A lesser problem is one of actual execution--a problem that crops up mostly in the dialogue, as the narration is adequate and the imagery often oddly beautiful. But as a gothic, the book succeeds admirably.

  Now let me suggest that, in addition to being a Southern gothic novel, Anne Rivers Siddons's The House Next Door, whatever its shortcomings in terms of characterization or execution, succeeds on far more important ground; it is a prime example of what Irving Malin calls "the new American gothic"--so is Straub's Ghost Story, for that matter, although Straub seems much more clearly aware of the species of fish he has netted (the clearest indication of this is his use of the Narcissus myth and the spooky use of the lethal mirror).

  John G. Park employed Malin's idea of the new American gothic in an article for Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction.5 Park's article is on Shirley Jackson's novel The Sundial, but what he says about that book is equally applicable to a whole slew of American ghost and horror stories, including several of my own. Here is Malin's "list of ingredients" for the modern gothic, as explained by Park in his article.

  First, a microcosm serves as the arena where universal forces collide. In the case of the Siddons book, the house next door serves as this microcosm.

  Second, the gothic house functions as an image of authoritarianism, of imprisonment, or of "confining narcissism." By narcissism, Park and Malin seem to mean a growing obsession with one's own problems; a turning inward instead of a growing outward. The new American gothic provides a closed loop of character, and in what might be termed a psychological pathetic fallacy, the physical surroundings often mimic the inward-turning of the characters themselves--as they do in The Sundial.6

  This is an exciting, even fundamental change in the intent of the gothic. Once upon a time the Bad Place was seen by critics as symbolic of the womb--a primarily sexual symbol which perhaps allowed the gothic to become a safe way of talking about sexual fears. Park and Malin are suggesting that the new American gothic, created primarily in the twenty or so years since Shirley Jackson published The Haunting of Hill House, uses the Bad Place not to symbolize sexual interests and fear of sex but interest in the self and fear of the self . . . and if anyone should ever ask you why there has been such a bulge in the popularity of horror fiction and horror films over the last five years or so, you might point out to your questioner that the rise of the horror film in the seventies and early eighties and the rise of such things as Rolfing, primal screaming, and hot-tubbing run pretty much in tandem, and that most of the really popular examples of the horror genre, from The Exorcist to Cronenberg's They Came from Within, are fine examples of the new American gothic, where we have, instead of a symbolic womb, a symbolic mirror.

  This may sound like a lot of academic bullshit, but it's really not. The purpose of horror fiction is not only to explore taboo lands but to confirm our own good feelings about the status quo by showing us extravagant visions of what the alternative might be. Like the scariest bad dreams, the good creepshow often does its work by turning the status quo inside out--what scares us the most about Mr. Hyde, perhaps, is the fact that he was a part of Dr. Jekyll all along. And in an American society that has become more and more entranced by the cult of me-ism, it should not be surprising that the horror genre has turned more and more to trying to show us a reflection we won't like--our own.

  While looking at The House Next Door, we find we can lay the Tarot card of the Ghost aside--there are no ghosts per se in the house which is owned by the Harralsons, the Sheehans, and the Greenes. The card which seems to fit better here is the card that always seems to come up when we deal with narcissism: the card of the Werewolf. More traditional werewolf stories almost always--knowingly or unknowingly--mimic the classic story of Narcissus; in the Lon Chaney, Jr., version, we observe Chaney observing himself in the Ever-Popular Pool of Water as he undergoes the transformation back from monster to Larry Talbot. We see the exact same scene occur in the original TV film of The Incredible Hulk as the Hulk returns to his David Banner form. In Hammer's Curse of the Werewolf, the scene is repeated yet again, only this time it's Oliver Reed who's watching himself undergo the change. The real problem with the house next door, we see, is that it changes people into the very things they
most abhor. The real secret of the house next door is that it is a dressing-room for werewolves.

  "Nearly all the characters of the new American gothic are narcissistic," Park sums up, "in one form or another, weaklings who try to read their own preoccupations into reality." This sums up Colquitt Kennedy, I think; and it also sums up Eleanor, the protagonist of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House; and Eleanor Vance is surely the finest character to come out of this new American gothic tradition.

  "The inspiration to write a ghost story," Lenemaja Friedman writes in her study of Jackson's work, "came to Miss Jackson . . . as she was reading a book about a group of nineteenth-century psychic researchers who rented a haunted house in order to study it and record their impressions of what they had seen and heard for the purpose of presenting a treatise to the Society for Psychic Research. As she recalls: 'They thought they were being terribly scientific and proving all kinds of things, and yet the story that kept coming through their dry reports was not at all the story of a haunted house, it was the story of several earnest, I believe misguided, certainly determined people, with their differing motivations and backgrounds.' The story so excited her that she could hardly wait to create her own haunted house and her own people to study it.