Haunted Reading Weekly
Oct. 11th, 2019 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhThe Invited by Jennifer McMahon. A horror novel set in modern-day rural Vermont. Helen and Nate, a pair of thirty-something suburban teachers, come into an unexpected windfall of money and decide to quit their jobs and start a small farm, complete with building their own perfect home that's designed from the ground up with their personal tastes and needs in mind. So basically every Millennial's dream.
Unfortunately the spot of countryside they buy for this ideal house comes with a local legend: back in the 1920s, an isolated woman was accused of being a witch and lynched by the townspeople. (Yes, the 1920s are crazy late for witchcraft trials, but the fact that it happened only a few generations out from the present day ends up being necessary for the plot.) Now this witch supposedly haunts the bog where she was hung, appearing as a white deer that lures people to their deaths, getting them lost in the woods or drowning them in bogwater.
Helen and Nate's new neighbor is a young girl named Olive, who's obsessed with the story of the witch and believes that somewhere on their property she left behind hidden treasure. Olive's mother has recently disappeared – presumed to have left her husband for another man – and Olive thinks that if she can find the treasure, her mom will return.
All of this makes for a fine setup for some thrills and chills; I particularly liked the idea of a haunted house story where the house is brand-new – still in the process of being built, even! Unfortunately The Invited ends up flat and fairly boring. I picked it up because I'd previously read McMahon's The Winter People, and though I had some problems with that book, she absolutely succeeded in crafting an atmosphere of suspense and horror. Those writing skills are nowhere to be found in The Invited. In addition to a dragging plot with extremely obvious twists, the characters are so bland and one-dimensional. I had the biggest problem with Helen, who is a historian/history teacher; we're told over and over that she longs to live in the simplicity and wholesomeness of the past. But her image of the past seems so... uninformed; it's history as imagined by someone whose sole source of information is the Hallmark Channel. Everyone I know who has actually studied history is far too aware of the rampant disease, dirty water, prejudices, violence, etc, to take such a shallow view of it.
Overall, there's nothing acutely wrong with The Invited, but it's an extremely meh book.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey. Nonfiction about ghost stories, but note that distinction: a book about ghost stories, not one of ghost stories. This is very much not in the vein of Haunted Ohio or Ghosts of Central Jersey or Spooky New Orleans or any other of that seemingly endless genre of credulous collections of ghost stories. No, Ghostland isn't really interested in the ghost stories themselves, but in where they come from, why we tell and retell them, and what cultural purposes they serve. Dickey takes a thoughtful, anthropological look at topics like why are we so afraid of abandoned insane asylums (perhaps we're ashamed of how we once treated our ill loved ones? perhaps it's their deliberately imposing architecture?), the KKK's manipulation of ghost stories about the Civil War's then-newly dead to terrorize free blacks, and, of course, our constant obsession with haunted "Indian Burial Grounds" (hmmm, could that possibly be about the spectre of unaddressed genocide? You think just maybe?). There are interviews with ghost hunting teams to see what they get out of the hobby, quotes from Freud on the concept of the uncanny, and an investigation of how tours at the real House of the Seven Gables have changed over the years in response to tourists' desires. In other words, it's a somewhat academic book that's fascinated by the concept of terror, but which is not looking to actually terrify its readers.
My favorite chapter came early on, in Dickey's analysis of the stories around the Winchester House. If you recognize the name, you probably know the myth: the widow of the owner of the company that produced Winchester rifles was haunted by the ghosts of all those killed by the guns, and so she built a crazily-complicated mansion under the belief that they could never reach her as long as she kept building; she held seances in a special room, incorporated the number "13" into much of the design, and deliberately built confusing staircases and labyrinthine hallways to fool the ghosts. According to Dickey, all of this is completely fictional nonsense without the least historical evidence. Sure, the house itself is a bit unusual, but Dickey argues that Mrs Winchester could easily be understood instead as an early female architect with the money to indulge her whims. So why do we focus on the creepy version of the story? That's exactly what Ghostland is all about.
Unfortunately the spot of countryside they buy for this ideal house comes with a local legend: back in the 1920s, an isolated woman was accused of being a witch and lynched by the townspeople. (Yes, the 1920s are crazy late for witchcraft trials, but the fact that it happened only a few generations out from the present day ends up being necessary for the plot.) Now this witch supposedly haunts the bog where she was hung, appearing as a white deer that lures people to their deaths, getting them lost in the woods or drowning them in bogwater.
Helen and Nate's new neighbor is a young girl named Olive, who's obsessed with the story of the witch and believes that somewhere on their property she left behind hidden treasure. Olive's mother has recently disappeared – presumed to have left her husband for another man – and Olive thinks that if she can find the treasure, her mom will return.
All of this makes for a fine setup for some thrills and chills; I particularly liked the idea of a haunted house story where the house is brand-new – still in the process of being built, even! Unfortunately The Invited ends up flat and fairly boring. I picked it up because I'd previously read McMahon's The Winter People, and though I had some problems with that book, she absolutely succeeded in crafting an atmosphere of suspense and horror. Those writing skills are nowhere to be found in The Invited. In addition to a dragging plot with extremely obvious twists, the characters are so bland and one-dimensional. I had the biggest problem with Helen, who is a historian/history teacher; we're told over and over that she longs to live in the simplicity and wholesomeness of the past. But her image of the past seems so... uninformed; it's history as imagined by someone whose sole source of information is the Hallmark Channel. Everyone I know who has actually studied history is far too aware of the rampant disease, dirty water, prejudices, violence, etc, to take such a shallow view of it.
Overall, there's nothing acutely wrong with The Invited, but it's an extremely meh book.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey. Nonfiction about ghost stories, but note that distinction: a book about ghost stories, not one of ghost stories. This is very much not in the vein of Haunted Ohio or Ghosts of Central Jersey or Spooky New Orleans or any other of that seemingly endless genre of credulous collections of ghost stories. No, Ghostland isn't really interested in the ghost stories themselves, but in where they come from, why we tell and retell them, and what cultural purposes they serve. Dickey takes a thoughtful, anthropological look at topics like why are we so afraid of abandoned insane asylums (perhaps we're ashamed of how we once treated our ill loved ones? perhaps it's their deliberately imposing architecture?), the KKK's manipulation of ghost stories about the Civil War's then-newly dead to terrorize free blacks, and, of course, our constant obsession with haunted "Indian Burial Grounds" (hmmm, could that possibly be about the spectre of unaddressed genocide? You think just maybe?). There are interviews with ghost hunting teams to see what they get out of the hobby, quotes from Freud on the concept of the uncanny, and an investigation of how tours at the real House of the Seven Gables have changed over the years in response to tourists' desires. In other words, it's a somewhat academic book that's fascinated by the concept of terror, but which is not looking to actually terrify its readers.
My favorite chapter came early on, in Dickey's analysis of the stories around the Winchester House. If you recognize the name, you probably know the myth: the widow of the owner of the company that produced Winchester rifles was haunted by the ghosts of all those killed by the guns, and so she built a crazily-complicated mansion under the belief that they could never reach her as long as she kept building; she held seances in a special room, incorporated the number "13" into much of the design, and deliberately built confusing staircases and labyrinthine hallways to fool the ghosts. According to Dickey, all of this is completely fictional nonsense without the least historical evidence. Sure, the house itself is a bit unusual, but Dickey argues that Mrs Winchester could easily be understood instead as an early female architect with the money to indulge her whims. So why do we focus on the creepy version of the story? That's exactly what Ghostland is all about.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-12 01:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-12 03:50 am (UTC)Well, this sounds like something I want.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-12 08:35 am (UTC)I read a thread on Twitter a while ago (last year, maybe?) where somebody made the point that the "creepy" things in the Winchester house were actually disability accommodations, such as the divided staircases - normal steps for the servants and shallow steps for the owner - as the old lady Winchester was, well, old and frail but also had the money to modify her house to her needs. According to OP of the thread the doors that didn't go anywhere were just modifications that hadn't been completed. It all seemed pretty reasonable to me!
no subject
Date: 2019-10-12 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-12 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-16 08:52 pm (UTC)I like that point a lot; Ghostland did talk about how disability is turned into a horror story in the chapter on abandoned mental asylums, but didn't get into it in regards to the Winchester House. He should have, because that's a great addition!
no subject
Date: 2019-10-17 04:57 pm (UTC)