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On Slippage: Defining the Haunted House from Bad Place to Black House
Carl H. Sederholm
There is no doubting the popularity of haunted houses in American culture, no matter how many NO TRESPASSING signs try to scare people away. At least since Poe’s Usher Mansion fell into the tarn, dozens of new houses have risen to take its place. In a recent study, Dale Bailey begins to account for this recurrent interest by suggesting that haunted houses provide a significant means of commenting on the conflicts that underlie the difference between ‘American ideals and realities’ (6). Most critics would agree with Bailey’s assessment; after all, it seems obvious that haunted houses serve a deeply symbolic, if not overtly critical, function. Discussions of The Shining, for example, frequently assert that the Overlook Hotel symbolizes the flaws and faults of American capitalism. Stephen King himself once suggested that the Overlook could be read as a symbol of ‘the American Dream run amok’ (quoted in Magistrale, p. 18). On the other hand, some critics prefer to read haunted houses strictly in terms of the tension between America’s sexual obsessions and repressions. Still others prefer to see the haunted house as an extension of madness, a kind of topography of the human mind.
The problem with much of this critical discussion is that it risks replacing the fundamental tension that lies at the heart of the haunted houses with the things they are supposed to symbolize. Bailey, for example, attempts to define the haunted house as a largely fixed archetype, something that will necessarily follow certain patterns in most texts. I argue, however, that the idea of the haunted house is fraught with such deep tensions that such stability may not be entirely possible. In Danse Macabre, King suggests such a reading when he describes haunted houses as both the ‘natural (or unnatural, if you prefer) habitat of ghosts’ (253). In other words, haunted houses violate any certain sense of categories, including those that attempt to explain them. Because of this, I suggest that we ought to read haunted houses largely in terms of their transgressiveness rather than on how carefully they adhere to a formula. My point is not that we should deny the need for formula, but that we should stress the ways haunted house narratives tend to resist them. To highlight this point, I will first summarize Stephen King and Peter Straub’s novel Black House, then I will survey some of the recent approaches to haunted house narratives. Finally, I will turn to Black House to discuss its use of the term ‘slippage’, a term that I believe not only describes haunted house narratives effectively, but that also reminds us of how deeply unstable they really are. Ultimately, what is at stake, here, is the need to redefine haunted house stories as tales that stress an inescapable tension between reality and fantasy.
For those who have read Black House, it may seem strange to characterize it as a haunted house narrative at all, let alone as a horror novel. But, as Heidi Strengell recently demonstrated, King’s novels are best described in terms of their shared interest in horror, no matter how far they initially seem to depart from convention (24). According to Strengell, King has his own particular ‘brand of horror’, one that is really a generic hybrid developed out of such traditions as literary naturalism, the Gothic, and fairy tales (22). In many ways, Black House is a strong example of such narrative complexity. Throughout the novel, King and Straub wind their way through various genres, including fantasy, western, science fiction and horror, not to mention a stop inside the world of King’s already genre-bending Dark Tower series.
No summary can adequately capture all the dimensions that make up Black House; nevertheless, I will briefly highlight a few key points that are most relevant to my discussion. Black House is the sequel to King and Straub’s novel The Talisman, the novel that first introduced us to Jack Sawyer and his need to journey both across the United States and through another world known as the ‘territories’ to save his dying mother. Sawyer returns in Black House as a young, though retired, detective for the Los Angeles Police Department. Now living in Wisconsin, Sawyer reluctantly agrees to help rescue a kidnapped boy named Tyler Marshall from a serial murderer known as the ‘Fisherman’. Eventually, Jack discovers that Tyler’s kidnapping is directly tied to a plot to destroy the very foundations of the universe, because of his unique mental capacity that can be used to destroy the Dark Tower, a structure that somehow holds the universe in place. Black House is significant to this plot because it serves as a kind of doorway into the territories themselves. But somehow, Black House is more than a doorway; it represents the idea that the dividing line between fantasy and reality is much thinner than most people think.
Before discussing Black House and its contribution to haunted house literature, I would like to spend a few moments discussing the notion of haunted houses generally. As most people are aware, houses are generally defined as places of strength and stability, places where people go to get away from the daily pressures of life. Appropriately, King and Straub draw on this ideal in some of their efforts to describe the horrors of Black House. They write that in general ‘homes stand as brave bulwarks against slippage’, and that they are to be understood as ‘places of sanity’ (567). Such an association of houses with sanity and safety has a long history, one that goes back to the more ancient notion that houses are supposed to represent a model sanctuary or temple. According to Mircea Eliade, ancient cultures saw houses as an imago mundi, an idealized image or scale model of the world. In other words, houses ideally represent the centre of one’s own universe, a place where one goes to commune with the divine (43). From this perspective, houses are more than just ‘brave bulwarks’ against trouble; they are, in fact, the kind of sacred spaces that we usually associate with temples or sanctuaries (King and Straub, p. 567).
Not surprisingly, haunted house narratives negate this traditional notion. But they do so in at least two different ways. Some haunted house stories, for example, depict the supernatural threat as coming mostly from the outside. As Gina Wisker describes it, such houses are rendered profane by something that ‘enters the domestic space, ghostly, murderous, threatening an invasion’ (192). This approach to the haunted house narrative is perhaps best described by Anne Rivers Siddons who, speaking of her book The House Next Door, explained that outside violations of the home seem to her to be an ‘emblem of particular horror’ (quoted in King, Danse, p. 259). She goes on to explain that the ‘desecration of it [the home], the corruption, as it were, by something alien takes on a peculiar and bone-deep horror and disgust. It is both frightening and…violating, like a sly, terrible burglar’ (259).
Other haunted house stories attempt to describe the threat as something internal. Though speaking in a much different context, Ralph Waldo Emerson once described such a state quite effectively. In his essay ‘Experience’ he writes that, ‘Every roof is agreeable to the eye, until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women, and hard-eyed husbands’ (‘Experience’, p. 472). In the context of horror literature, Stephen King once described haunted houses in similar terms. He writes: ‘the good horror story about the Bad Place whispers that we are not locking the world out; we are locking ourselves in . . . with them’ (Danse, p. 255). One of the most famous extensions of the idea of the house as an internal threat is found in Shirley Jackson’s famous description of Hill House as ‘not sane’.
Stephen King’s own contribution to this discussion is twofold: first, in Dance Macabre he introduced the idea that the haunted house ought to be understood as an archetype he refers to as a Bad Place. What King means by this term is summarized by his hint that there is ‘much more’ to a haunted house than the traditional image of ‘the fallen-down house at the end of Maple Street with the weedy lawn, the broken windows, and the moldering FOR SALE sign’ (252). To put it another way, King is really inviting his readers to consider haunted houses as symbols of something beyond the idea of a mere residence. Indeed, he goes on to suggest that a Bad Place may appear anywhere. Houses are particularly strong examples of the Bad Place mostly because of the resonance they hold with most people. Houses, after all, can provide shelter for the greatest joys and the worst terrors. Houses, in other words, are some of the most unstable symbols we have. After all, the outwardly happy home sometimes masks the worst problems. King comments on this problem by indicating that some houses may even develop a kind of emotional memory. In this sense, the Bad Place symbolizes the most primitive emotions of humankind. King suggests that ‘the fact that many haunted houses are shunned and get the reputation of being Bad Places might be due to the fact that the strongest emotions are the primitive ones—rage and hate and fear’ (253). Such emotions remain in the house and create a kind of ‘psychic residue’ that others may feel, no matter how many years have passed since they were left behind (253).
Secondly, King draws on his own notion of the Bad Place to create some of the more memorable examples of it in recent years. One thinks almost immediately of the Overlook Hotel, a Bad Place that King filled with ghosts, ‘psychic residue’, and troubled families (253). Other examples of King’s use of the Bad Place include the Marsten House from ‘Salem’s Lot and his more recent variation on Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Rose Red.
Probably the most comprehensive critical approach to haunted house narratives, including King’s own, is Dale Bailey’s recent book American Nightmares. In that book Bailey argued that haunted house narratives matured in the 1970s and 1980s in such a way that they may now be understood in terms of a ‘rigid formula’ (5). This formula, according to Bailey, offers readers a distinctive means of understanding and interpreting the various possibilities haunted houses hold as a means of criticizing and challenging the tensions that lie at the center of the American experience. Briefly summarized, Bailey’s haunted house formula draws on four main areas: Setting, Characters, Plot and Themes (56). Together, each of these main components forms the heart of a haunted house narrative. To help us understand this point, I will briefly illustrate how this might work: We begin with an old house, usually one with a dark and troubled past. Into this house enters a family or a ‘family surrogate’, who shortly thereafter begins to experience supernatural manifestations of various sorts (56). Within the tension between the natural and the supernatural we are able to recognize the development of prominent themes, such as ‘class and gender conflict’, ‘consequences of the past’, and the ‘cyclical nature of evil’, to name only a few (56). I will not take the time to elaborate on each of Bailey’s components further. The strength of Bailey’s position is that he regards the formula as a kind of theme and variations – precisely the sort of thing that characterizes the various developments of the ‘Elizabethan sonnet sequence’ or even a well-played tennis match (6). He writes that ‘good haunted house novels, like good sonnets, deploy their conventions in startling ways, and in the best novels these innovations have a thematic dimension’ (6). In other words, the haunted house formula lies in the creative ways authors manipulate and transform structure.
I’m of two minds about Bailey’s claims regarding a haunted house formula. I agree with his point that haunted house narratives generally follow certain patterns that inform their meanings. On the other hand, even if haunted houses do adhere to such a rigid formula, I argue that this approach may be too reductive. After all, a haunted house represents much more than the sum of the individual parts Bailey identifies. By definition, haunted houses are places of inherent tension, a tension implied by the dual residency of the living and the dead. By approaching haunted houses according to Bailey’s interpretive model, we risk overlooking not only the tension they represent but also the fundamental tensions that lie at the heart of the gothic itself. Haunted house narratives ought to be considered as a sub-genre of the gothic, that is, as narratives characterized by their generally transgressive natures. Clive Bloom’s own description of horror narratives makes a similar point. He writes that ‘the horror tale proper refuses rational explanation, appealing to a level of visceral response beyond conscious interpretation’ (165).
Having just argued that haunted house narratives tend to challenge and extend convention, let us now turn our attention to Black House and how it refuses these conventions even further. With Black House, Stephen King and Peter Straub are attempting to represent something that is both unknown and unknowable. They do so by challenging the notion of the haunted house, including, to some extent, King’s very notion of the Bad Place itself by describing Black House almost entirely in terms of what they call ‘slippage’. To define slippage, King and Straub invite readers to compare it to a borderland. Early in Black House, King and Straub imagine the town of French Landing as a kind of borderland, a place where all things teeter toward a state of near-chaos. As they put it, Black House has ‘spewed the slippery stuff into French Landing and the surrounding towns’ (616). This ‘slippery stuff’, King and Straub suggest, has the ability to render everything unstable. Such material is really the stuff of borderlands, a place that is already filled with ‘unruliness and distortion’ (32). King and Straub write that in borderlands, ‘the grotesque, the unpredictable, and the lawless take root. . .and luxuriate. The central borderlands flavor is of slippage’ (32, emphasis theirs). Slippage, like borderlands, attempts to describe a condition where everything is unstable. The only difference between the two is that while borderlands mark off the territories between the safe and the unsafe, slippage is constantly drifting between the two in ways that prevent it from ever knowing one or the other completely.
To put it another way, slippage does not describe a condition of temporary confusion or doubt. Instead, slippage suggests a state in which everything one accepts as real, as factual, is constantly subject to revision. Even worse, slippage also refers to the anticipation of such an unstructured state. As King and Straub put it, ‘one secondary definition of slippage is: the feeling that things in general have just gotten, or very shortly will get worse’ (34, emphasis theirs).
What makes Black House so interesting is that King and Straub constantly attempt to describe it as an example of such a condition. These descriptions matter because they revise the traditional haunted house formula to such an extent that they bring us face to face with the original problem with haunted houses themselves: the fact that they are places of complete instability. King and Straub emphasize this idea when they write that Black House cannot be described on the outside or the inside using any conventional means. They write that Black House ‘deflects inquiry and resists interpretation’ (30). Such resistance is due, in part, to the fact that one can never look at Black House long enough to notice all its external details correctly. The house is somehow capable of ‘evading the eye, so that it fades away if attention wanders, and must be located again’ (29). Worse still, Black House is ‘hard to look at from the outside’ because ‘the eyes play continual tricks’ on the person trying to look at it (567). Even on the inside, the house continues to elude direct observation. King and Straub write that the interior layout and structure of the house changes with each blink of an eye.
In one key instance, King and Straub describe Jack Sawyer entering Black House only to discover a series of moving staircases, none of which seem to follow any particular sense of order. All he sees are ‘a thousand stairways, some moving, bulging in and out’ (614, emphasis theirs). Even worse, every door opens out to endless passages, some of which suggest nothing more than an eternity of ‘whirling vortexes’, and even ‘emptiness’ itself (614). In fact, the closer one gets to it, the more Black House recedes into ‘its own shadow’, and resists objectification (31). Unlike the usual image of the Bad Place that stands, gloomy and foreboding, atop a hill, Black House prefers to hide and is completely unwelcoming of its visitors. King and Straub suggest that Black House goes about ‘concealing itself’ so that nobody will know it is there (29, emphasis theirs).
Whereas most haunted house stories temporarily challenge epistemological categories only to reassert them by the end, Black House is almost entirely about the absence of any kind of certainty. King and Straub stress this idea by suggesting that Black House simply doesn’t belong anywhere. In fact, Black House may not even be a real house. Instead, it is a kind of ‘wormhole in the apple of existence, leading all the way down into the furnace-lands. It’s a door’ (488). Even if one could somehow enter this door, he or she would quickly discover that the interior is ‘almost infinite’ and that it is decorated mostly with things such as ‘bits of clothing, pitiful scratching on the walls of gigantic rooms with strange dimensions, [and] the occasional heap of bones’ (568). All of this detail serves as a reminder that Black House is really a place of violent death; even the house projects a feeling of ‘utter lifelessness’ that causes people to recoil in fear.
Unlike the archetypal Bad Place with its broken windows and damaged roof, Black House constantly shifts in size and appearance. King and Straub put it this way: ‘There’s the way the house won’t hold its shape, for one thing – the way it sometimes seems enormous, as if it is many houses somehow all overlaid. A city perhaps the size of London folded under a single weird roof’ (608). Worse, there is something awful about the house that prevents people from wanting to look at it, let alone go inside. As King and Straub write, so strange is Black House that it could never be a ‘“Haunted Mansion,” [or] a “Castle of terrors,” in an amusement park, [because] its capacity to repel ticket buyers would put it out of business within a week’ (31). In other words, Black House doesn’t resemble any other kind of haunted house. Moreover, it does not serve as a type of haunted house that people would recognize as such. Ultimately, Black House resists any archetypal notion of the haunted house, including that of the Bad Place.
Having argued for the importance of slippage to my reading of haunted houses, I should probably point out that King and Straub seem unable to sustain their position by the end of the novel. After Jack Sawyer successfully rescues Tyler Marshall and restores (temporarily) some sense of order in the universe, he steps out of Black House only to realize that it has somehow changed. As Jack looks at the house he realizes that it is ‘only a house, now – a three-story job that might once have been a respectable ranch but has fallen into disrepair over the years. To make matters worse, someone has slopped it with black paint from top to bottom and stem to stern – even the windows have been blurred with swipes of that paint’ (636). Through this description, King and Straub seem to suggest that Black House has finally become stable. They write that even ‘the house’s slippery shifting shape has solidified’ (636). But has it really? Can such a house, one that was once described as something that ‘deflects inquiry and resists interpretation’ really change? (30) I would argue that it can’t. Even Jack promises to eventually destroy it. But for now, King and Straub want to convince us that it is finally representing the very thing it has been resisting from the start; it has become a Bad Place, the broken down home at the end of the street where nobody ever goes to visit.
Works Cited
Bailey, Dale (1999) American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula
in American Popular Fiction (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State
University Popular Press).
Bloom, Clive (2001) ‘Horror Fiction: In Search of a Definition’, A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Malden, MA: Blackwell), pp. 155-166.
Eliade, Mircea (1959) The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt Brace).
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1983) ‘Experience’, Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America).
King, Stephen (1981) Danse Macabre (New York: Everest House).
--- and Straub, Peter (2001) Black House (New York: Ballantine).
Magistrale, Tony (1992) Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half (New York: Twayne Publishers).
Strengell, Heidi (2005) Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press).
Wisker, Gina (2005) Horror Fiction: An Introduction
(New York: Continuum).
