Two Hauntings

In this genre, haunting is a phenomenon that afflicts both places and people. Sometimes the people are haunted because the place is, and sometimes the place is haunted because the people are. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish the difference. In either case, it is better when stories rely on more than what I call the “ooga-booga,” the overt demonstrations of paranormal manifestation afflicting a given architecture, the sheeted phantasms popping through walls to turn the thermostat way down on their way to rattling the furniture like maracas. Horror is, after all, the essential language of human darkness, and it’s not human darkness if it’s just something exclaiming “Ooga-booga” (as I remind you, Groucho Marx did with no expectations of scaring us in the final sequence of A Night at the Opera).

A Haunting on the Hill
Elizabeth Hand
Hardcover / Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 978-0316527323
Mulholland Books, October 2023, 336 pages

Shirley Jackson’s classic novel The Haunting of Hill House, an essential text and the basis of two movies and one season of television (retrospectively: capital-G great, terrible, and an unknown quantity to yours truly), is the key illustration of this principle, as its doomed protagonist Eleanor was very much haunted before she wandered into the titular domicile and would have been just as haunted had it been a themed hotel in Miami. The novel is about how the maddening ghosts of Hill House, if they even existed, didn’t alter her trajectory, but merely sped it along. It was therefore an immediately pressing question, whether the authorized sequel, A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand, enjoys the same strengths. The answer is: yes and no. This time, decades after the first book, the renter is Holly Sherwin, a playwright who is using much of her recent grant money to stay there with her actress lover, Nisa, and several people involved in rehearsals for a spooky musical she has written, and which represents a do-or-die moment for her career.

Scary stuff happens. That cannot be denied. And Hand, who knows her way around a paragraph, certainly does provide everything the genre requires in such a situation, which includes the advice of locals to get the hell out of the damned place while they still have a chance. I did not dislike the book. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I critically did not fall head-over-heels in adoration with it, not in the same way I did with Jackson’s work, and this is not a function of the original being such a towering classic that nothing could possibly ever compete with it. It just doesn’t work as well as a multiple-viewpoint narrative, as the original, with its focus on the inexorable disintegration of one person. Here, everybody in Holly’s party alternates narratives, and some of them reach the point where they should leave without quite reaching the impetus to do so, until the crisis of the climactic point. Again, a good novel, one that rewards the reading. This is a recommendation. Just not a fervent one.

The Haunting of Velkwood
Gwendolyn Kiste
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1982172374
Saga Press, March 5, 2024, 256 pages

Contrast this with The Haunting of Velkwood by Gwendolyn Kiste. And some of you may note, before I get started, that it’s been vanishingly few columns since I reviewed a prior Kiste novel, Reluctant Immortals, which used vampirism as a powerful metaphor for how women are affected by parasitic, gaslighting exes who refuse to go away, here embodied, in part, but none other than Dracula. Do I betray my commitment to breadth by returning to Kiste after what in publishing terms amounts to an eyeblink? Maybe. I don’t care. Because this one is similarly terrific.

Here, the haunted place is a suburban neighborhood that has gone all spectral: people, houses, and all. It is a nationally known phenomenon, a street in a development that didn’t just die but also came back within a perimeter that almost nobody can cross. It has blighted the lives of three young women who were absent and outside that perimeter when the event took place, and of course this has much to do with terrible things that happened when they lived there, things that haunted them, in the emotional sense, long before they left. Now in her forties, unemployed and on the brink of eviction, our protagonist Talitha Velkwood is lured back by paranormal investigators to penetrate the veil and re-enter the perimeter, her own motivation being to rescue the people she left behind, primarily her younger sister Sophie and her friend, the neighborhood weird kid, Enid. Early on it becomes clear that the phenomenon is not a total mystery to Talitha. She knows exactly what caused this. But can she stop it?

So, okay, here the word “haunted” serves both meanings, the psychological and the supernatural, with the neighborhood being a bad place that for Talitha embodies a raft of childhood issues including bad parenting, traumatic early sexuality, and the disapproval of her elders, all things that have made her—I’m sorry, but it’s inherent in the material—a ghost of the adult she should have been. Talitha’s journeys into the unchanging landscape of the street where she grew up amount to psychological forensics, peeling layers from the trauma she has known and its effect on the place where she grew up until she finally works out a way to confront it. Kiste withholds until the end the key issue, whether Talitha will be able to get past this and move on. She should. But the nature of the phenomenon in this book is that the personal and the paranormal are different manifestations of the real thing, that by the novel’s conclusion do what I’ve praised in works by others. They contract to a singularity.

This is powerful as hell. And scary as hell, too, without ever resorting to meaningless ooga-booga.

On the basis of this and Reluctant Immortals, Kiste has now become, officially, one of my favorite writers within this genre, and the odds are high that when she produces her next, I will continue my disproportionately complete coverage of her developing canon. Not to put too fine a point on it, folks, she is still blossoming, and worth the attention.

See you next time.