Home Sweet (Sinister) Home: Haunted Quarantines

"A house is a place to go back to, to regroup in. A house is a kind of a special corner of the universe. It's a place where everyone whoever lived in it still does.[...] That's the nature of a house. It absorbs its occupants, kind of keepin' them forever alive." --- 'Maynard's House'

It's fitting during quarantine I'd grab for books about houses. More exact, tales of being confined inside houses where the safety is questionable, and the mental deterioration and claustrophobic terrors reign. In a small way it's taking my mind off of the real time horrors of COVID-19 and the shitshow of a response to it (...and a bunch of other madness --- 2020 is truly on some ain't shit, isn't it?). Still, my imagination runs, and runs into thinking about when a home isn't a safe dwelling, where the walls that shield you from the outside betray (and how it must suck to be quarantined in a haunted house while you've got a damn pandemic going on...). Whether ancient in stance or freshly erected on disturbed ground, where its sinister legacy --- or awakening to --- outweighs its purported domesticity. *cue thunder clap*

I kind of inadvertently kicked off "haunted quarantine reads" with Rosemary's Baby, where a doomed heroine is sequestered in her spacious New York apartment by geriatric devil worshipers and a trash heap husband. While that tale was nestled 'safe' in a city of thousands, two others I read --- The Silent Companions and Maynard's House --- both take a different approach as they focus on the haunted dwellings that reside on the outskirts of civilization, consuming their occupants into a spiral of insanity and terror that falls on deaf ears *cue more thunder claps* Haunted house stories often are cut from the same Gothic cloth, but when they detour from the norm and elevate the "dark and desolate dwelling" motif, I tend to take notice, and these unique tales had my undivided attention whilst sequestered in my own confide space, scaring the wits outta me even more than my daily news feed...*cue thunder clap, evil laughter, howling wolf, and Toupee Fiasco's word vomit tweets* 

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"Ivy poured out of the eaves and engulfed the turrets at either end of the house. It looked dead. Everything was dead. Parterres lay prostrate beneath the soulless gaze of the windows, the hedges brown and riddled with holes. Vines choked the flowerbeds. Even the lawns were yellow and sparse, as if a contagion spread slowly throughout the grounds."

The Silent Companions occupies a bunch of cliches and worn-out tropes of the neo-Victorian novel. Crumbling mansion. A disturbing familial legacy. Locked up spider-webbed  "west wings" with ~secrets~ and yellow-paged diaries. Fidgety oddball servants. Paranoia around every corner. Our main character waking up in an insane asylum, committing some crime she swore she didn't commit ...yup, the Gothic motif gang is all here. Yet, to carry these tropes out in a fresh, intelligent and creepy way is where I commend author Laura Purcell. 

Purcell even forgoes an enigmatic brooding love interest a la Edward Rochester so we're left with focusing on the house of horrors our main heroine has stepped in. Oh, and our heroine isn't plain, or a Jane, but she's rather grouchy and bossy, and I guess you'd be too if you were widowed, pregnant, and had to live in a centuries-old clammy castle that carries the weight of a horrific legacy that keeps the surrounding townspeople on edge and its livestock on high alert. To see this constant complainer get taken for a ride was fun...until it wasn't, this when the house begins to show its true nature and intent, and our heroine begins slipping into serious darkness.

This isn't a perfect book, and can come off not as unique for its trove of tropes, but I appreciated being drawn in and feeling dread burn slow and steady, in a pacing that doesn't wander or waver on emitting a sense of mental dislodging throughout. I had to read this book in the daylight due to its utter creepiness --- and that's not usual for someone who relishes in horror reads.

As much as I tend to spoil things here and there for (over) analyzing sake, but I feel going into this book blind is the best bet. Not even knowing what a "silent companion" was when I dove in kept the the creep factor afloat and I dared not hop on Google for the answer. Still, once you do find out these companions were real deals (they're a type of wood-carved painting/sculpture that was popular in the Netherlands during the 17th Century) and realize Purcell turned some carved wood into a malicious antagonist, the fright is never diminished and takes on a sinister presence that becomes unimaginable. 

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"He didn't like it. He was not in charge. Something else was gradually asserting itself, coming on the scene to call the tune and pull the strings. Something calculating and chilling, and he wanted to go home. And that was what the trouble was--he had no home other than the one he was in." 

Who knew the author of Summer of '42 wrote a horror book? Consider me someone who didn't. For my fellow young folk, Summer of '42 was the Fifty Shades of Grey of its day (well, minus the BDSM stuff...and the comical fan fiction writing) as it flew off the shelves, soared up the best-seller list, and captured readers with its pearl clutching story line of a teenage boy having an affair with a much older married woman during World War II. Herman Raucher continued to release other books that journeyed through complex coming of ages, later starring runaways and newlyweds, but 1980's Maynard's House was his first, only, and last stab at the horror genre, and seemed to fall through the cracks of '80s paperback horror history for reasons unknown. It certainly didn't deserve its fate, but for its obscurity on the shelf, it was a treat to read something from the '80s horror cannon without the last name of King, Koontz or Saul attached.

As the Summer of '42 focuses on the budding of adulthood around a populated, lush beach town, Maynard's House takes the opposite approach as we witness the deconstruction of adulthood, among a frozen, bitter isolation. 

Traveling as the only passenger on a freight train into a tundra of prickling uncertainty is Austin Fletcher, 23 years of age, freshly discharged from the US army, and on a mission to honor a slain friend's will. That slain friend is Maynard Whittier, once a member of Austin's platoon during the Vietnam War. Among the rice paddies --- and much to Austin's surprise --- Maynard befriended our main character, and willed him his home in the small township of Belden. Three days later, after making this claim, Maynard is killed on the battlefield, leaving Austin to wonder all the whys and hows of their brief bromance and his bestowed benefaction. Curiosity gets the better of him, and without much of a life to go back to after the horrors of war, Austin makes the sojourn into the thicket of the Maine wilderness to discover what lies of his odd inheritance.

 

Inclement weather delays his entrance into Belden, but Austin being determine to 'prove' his dedication to his dead army buddy treks onward, taking the winter head on while lacking any sense of his surroundings or proper attire to combat the brutal temperature. He almost dies due to his ignorance, but is rescued and revived, taken to the town's station house, where it's manager and "jack of all trades", Jack Meeker gives Austin the low-down on Belden and its harsh winters --- along with informing Austin of the haunted grounds that Maynard's house occupies, as it was once the site of a witch hanging back in the sixteenth century. Austin first bristles and scoffs at the locals, and waves off their eccentricities and their stories, often humoring their folksy manner with smirks and wise-cracks, but he soon discovers the 'local color' is anything but concerning the bleak solitude he has naively strolled into. 

This book made me think on houses allowing you to stay and remain in comfort. How a house can choose you, and how simple wooden beams and bricks can become a betrayal. As someone who moved into an older house that once belonged to my grandparents, though I've been to this house most of my life, living here is a different scenario. I still don't feel settled here never mind the years being here. I still feel this house isn't 'me' and has a creeping discomfort at times even when there isn't a specter in sight (well, that I know of!). Yet, this house hasn't outright rejected me or has a complicated backstory, unlike Austin's newest dwelling, which has a few tales of its own, all documented on a wood plank situated in a corner where past inhabitants have written out their thoughts about the sinister happenings they've endured. One past occupant even scribes: The house is not fit. It never was. Nor will it burn. To hell with it.  

A weird sympathy I have for Austin over his need to have this house be "his". He's like most, trying to exist and belong in a world, a society that rejects him at every consistent turn. To his parents he should have never existed. He lacks in friends. No woman can recall him as a lover. The military promotes the act of unity, but only on the battlefield, not on individual acceptance. The Vietnam War itself is isolating for Austin. It was a war of sheer insanity, with no heroes or clarity of its purpose. Upon its bitter end, soldiers returned to the States to be met with ridicules and slammed doors, all for their involvement in a war they didn't have any form of say-so in organizing. Austin is, in short, an non-entity, a nondescript loner. 

Austin seems to attach himself to Maynard on the simple fact that he acknowledged his existence and treated him like a friend. For the first time, Austin feels like he belongs, that he knows 'a someone', and that 'someone' knows him, and has entrusted him with his most sacred possession. This is a honor higher than the military can ascribe. It's why Austin tries with all might to get to Belden, to love and honor what was bestowed to him, this as a means to continue his attachment to the one person who gave him a purpose and possess something in his name. 

My sympathies towards Austin are even weirder as he isn't the most well-defined character ever written. We never know much about him, only know the dull stats that make him a face in the crowd (and Raucher makes him featureless for a reason...) What he does display in place of mediocrity isn't appealing. His social awkwardness paints him as an ass. He acts like he knows it all, and insults others, all as a means to bolster himself and shield others from catching on to his inadequacies. For all that, I still felt a bit sorry for him, because he hasn't a clue of how his one chance to belong and to matter, becomes his undoing.

The caveat to this is Austin also suffers from PTSD, making him unreliable and compromised to his own rattling thoughts and viewpoints. Through his eyes we're not quite sure what is real and what isn't projection of a disintegrating mind. His surroundings are warped to where ordinary objects morph into sinister shapes: Is that rocking chair truly creaking? Are those Maynard's dead dogs barking? His mind might be crafting scenarios that hint at his underlining character: Is the threatening bear that is about to clobber and destruct the house a mere manifestation of his churning inner rage? The squirrels that are thrashing about the rafters a reflection of his collapsing mental state? 

Are the locals really there or figments of Austin's conflating identity crisis?: Is Ara, the young girl who waffles between being a child to a seductive woman a sign of his sexual iniquity, impotency? [And to note the underage "romantic" angle presented here gave me the creeps...and keeps in theme with Raucher's fixation on underage romances: see Summer of '42] Is her little brother Froom representative of Austin's lost innocence? Is Jack Meeker the moral, knowledgeable compass he wishes he was? Benson the type of fearless hunter he vies to be? 

The only tangible line of sanity that rolls in Austin's mind are his reciting the words of essayist and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, this thanks to Maynard (once again) having a particular interest with his writings. Thoreau ends up being an extra, supporting character, echoing as a prophetic sage choral that guides Austin as well as dictates his somber path --- that is if you read between the lines. How Raucher manages to douse Thoreau's words into the inkiest of threats is some impressive literary magic: "...I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach---and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

At the end, I almost didn't know what to make of Maynard's House. The last chapter felt unnecessary, or heightened the mindfuck: I'm still debating. I'm also still debating on if the entire scenario from Maynard's house on down wasn't just Austin manifesting that in his mind due to his PTSD. Of course, that's the great thing about fiction, it's read one way and never is one thing, and Maynard's House falls into that category of being devoid of rational reason and that to me is what makes great horror, the murkiness of the particulars, the why and how wandering in the grey area. It's a truly creepy and compelling read that deserves its pluck from obscurity for its psychological zaniness and turning a picturesque winter wonderland into a brutal hellscape.