Inhuman Places Make Human Monsters
Setting in story and real life
If you’re new here, welcome to Kindling. Today’s article is brought to you by Shirley Jackson’s brilliant, The Haunting of Hill House. I’m finishing up The Shining, preparing for next Saturday’s monthly (soon to be weekly) Stephen King book club meeting, The Barrens. If that seems like your thing, check out the schedule here. For the next 20 weeks we’ll be reading through King’s first short story collection, Night Shift, and meeting up on Saturday’s to talk about it.
I’m educating myself on the genre I love. Last month’s Salem’s Lot read has a lot to do with that. King took what was at the time a dead monster in fiction (no one cared much for vampires when he wrote the book) and revitalized it with a new take. This happens over and over again with story. After all, the Master of Horror himself has said there are only a handful of horror stories.
That’s right, a handful. No story is original. We tell ourselves the same tales with similar lessons over and over again. Then forget the lessons, and have to put the monster in a new costume, the hero in modern armor. They are all patterns, stories, and that follows life doesn’t it? Just as we share similar faces with strangers around the world, doppelgangers who share no relation to us, we share similar experiences. It’s what binds us together in fandom behind a book or TV series or movie. We see ourselves somewhere in those pages or on the screen.
Stephen King has a way with place, setting as it’s called in literature. He knows how to make a place feel like a person. Derry, the little town where Pennywise eats kids. The Overlook Hotel, where Jack Torrance loses his mind to the evil there. The Marsten House in Jerusalem’s Lot, where evil things happen and evil people live. This is a recurring theme in his books, but it’s not just him.
Shirley Jackson wrote the handbook so to speak with her famous story, The Haunting of Hill House. I read it a couple of years ago, and due to hype was a little disappointed. But two years later and a couple hundred stories more under my belt, I’m seeing her genius there.
The house is not necessarily haunted by spirits, but is itself aware, alive in some grotesque way. It draws people to it, almost as if to gobble them up. I have a feeling that if that house were torn down, and some other structure built upon it, it would hold the same spirit, something King explores in Pet Sematary.
Maybe that’s the concept haunted objects and places embody. If you believe in the soul—and hell even if you don’t, a belief in consciousness suffices for this thought exercise—then you believe in something along the same lines. Our bodies are haunted places, filled with memory and experience.
We hold multitudes within us, past, present and future. We act out those things that have happen before, feel their effects in our physical form today as if they were occurring in this moment. How then, is a haunted house any different from that?
“This inhuman place makes human monsters.”
If you didn’t recognize the title of this article, it comes from a repeated line in The Shining—this inhuman place makes human monsters. You could sum up a lot of King’s books with that one line. It’s obviously something that fed his imagination, and he followed it through from hauntings to vampires to killer clowns.
But as with all things fiction, there’s a truth in here. There are places that seem to corrupt or infringe on our ability to be our best selves. It’s why some people hit the road as soon as they’re old enough and never look back at home.
Take the child raised in a house with addicts, dreaming of some different life. If they stay after they could have left, their lives are typically bound up in that sadness, doomed by destiny to repeat the lives of their families, passing it onto their children, and so goes generations of addicts. Same with poverty, abuse, and any number of things that can grab onto human beings (like demons or ghosts in stories) and tear our lives apart.
What places can be described as inhuman? The battlefield, concentration camps, sterile institutions, prisons. There are more I’m sure. More places and experiences that turn the tide of a person’s life to the dark side. Inhuman places that make human monsters.
This week on Notes, I asked a question that sprung up from my reading, and I wanted to pose it here for all of you! A belief in ghosts is not required to answer this question. Just a thought that I had that might turn into a story one day.
Thinking haunted houses, haunted places, and the lore behind them. What makes them so? If you tear down a haunted house, where do the spirits go? Is it the ground that makes that place a den of spirits? Or is it like a mock possession, spirits searching for a physical structure to inhabit?
If a haunted house gets torn down, the ghosts ____. Fill in the blank for me! Let’s Go!
I find that I enjoy his earlier works more. I agree with you that he tends to go on with back story. Dark Tower, for example, never caught me. Carrie and Misery, though I really enjoyed. I'm working on Salem's Lot now (behind the reading group). That's his second published book, I believe. He tends to write great characters that jump off the page
I’m a huge Haunting of Hill House fan. I’ve read it a few times. I think the house and Eleanore both fit your theme perfectly. Eleanore is definitely a haunted person. She can’t let go of anything that’s happened to her. The house is malignant and uses that against her. I always see the house as an extension of Eleanore’s dead mother, controlling her thoughts and actions.
Have you read Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In the Castle? It’s not a haunted house story, but it’s a little more traditionally satisfying in terms of horror. It’s another one of my favorites.