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. 

Novella November: The Love Child

"A love-child, the phrase had surged up from her inner consciousness, and she spoke it without realizing what it implied. It just did express what Clarissa truly was to her---the creation of the love of all her being. It was the truth, and in face of the truth she knew that no one could take the child away. She had saved her."

Being an only child led me to manifest Jasmine. She was a bit older than me, smarter, cooler, owned a pink Corvette, and had luxurious glitter dusted hair that she dragged across the floor. I told anyone who'd listen that Jasmine (yes, she was named after Aladdin's main squeeze) was my sister. My parents played along. They poured extra Kool-Aid for her, set a placemat at our table for her, made sure she was buckled up in the backseat --- for my benefit they entertained this second "daughter".

After some time Jasmine started to become an issue, this when I began to talk about her outside of the comforts of home. Jasmine never went to school with me (she was older and cooler remember?), but I blabbed about her enough to where she became known to my teacher. Little did I know that I had successfully convinced her of Jasmine's existence so much so that when my parents came to a PTA meeting (yes, my parents actually went to those) my teacher asked about Jasmine's whereabouts and was greeted with my parents' quizzical stares.

Jasmine is no more, as all the "imaginary friends" I have now are characters in stories that I have hibernating in unfinished word docs, but it's a little funny that what made Jasmine more "alive" was not me just believing in her existence, but that I kept her in the confides of home, and once she became realized outside of that, poof! she was gone. Gone because she wasn't just exclusive to me anymore. I had messed up giving her away. Reality had intruded the fantasy. In short, I grew up.

To create a person out of thin air, give them shape and identity and then be able to convince others of such a creation requires an intimacy that is challenging to explain. Of course psychoanalysts, child experts whathaveyou have tried to link the appearance of an imaginary friend to a child having a social "problem", and since only children are sheltered little monsters who bray at the moon at midnight every third Thursday, we are classified as having such a "problem." (I'm kidding) True, I created Jasmine's existence due to a desire to have siblings, but it also was an inkling of the storytelling life I would quasi-live one day, and the wild imagination that I continue to have all so I can keep a little fantasy in my reality.

Maybe that's why I was drawn to this odd little novella as The Love Child actually delves into that weird, sorta Frankenstein-equse way we 'create' individuals in our adolescent, and how they somehow translate towards our adulthood. The Love Child delves a little further as it asks the question: what would happen if you conjured up your imaginary friend as an adult? If you're Agatha Bodenham, you'd play along, that is, till such a creation begins to consume you greatly...