A Haunted Haunted-House

HAUNTED HOUSE by Jan Pienkowski (Heinemann, 1979)
THE HOUSE OF MADAME M by Clotilde Perrin (Gecko Press, 2019)

As thunder peals, a swathe of bats darts in front of a dilapidated Queen-Anne-style house, its darkened windows lit up by a flash of lightning. A Hammond organ cranks into life to accompany scenes of secret panels creaking open while evil eyes glow from the shadows...

This - the opening titles for Scooby Doo - is for many, the quintessence of the haunted house: a creepy old pile in the middle of nowhere, festooned with dust and cobwebs; and very enjoyable such tropes are - you know where you are with this sort of house.

But if our youthful interest is piqued we might explore a bit more as we grow older, and eventually find ourselves on the doorstep of Bly or Paramore (Henry James), Hill House (Shirley Jackson), or Hundreds Hall (Sarah Waters). In these 'grown-up' haunted houses, the oppression is palpable - they have a hold on someone in the story and will not let go. Bly and Paramore stifle a governess and an heir respectively, both of whom are obsessed (though for different reasons) with the family's seat; Hill House is vitalised by the psychic energies of its damaged visitors; and Hundreds Hall casts its spell via a malign Englishness, nostalgia and class tensions translated into the victim's obsession. People who visit these houses are already haunted by themselves; the houses give physical substance to their spiritual anxiety. Like Rebecca's Manderley, the atmospheres of the buildings  become deeply impressed on our psyches; they cast long shadows; you don't quite know where you are with this sort of house.

There is a pop-up book, Haunted House by Jan Pienkowski, that I think does for the child's mind as do those 'grown up' houses described. It may seem at first glance to be the usual haunted-house-for-kids fodder, with its sheeted ghosts and spiders and a gigantic (vampire?) bat, though it lingers stickily in the mind long after childhood; there is an atmosphere to it. Don't get me wrong, it's a very entertaining and darkly humorous book: I adored it as a boy (and still do!) and continue to see children today discovering its amusing weirdness with the same sense of delight. But it's also a disconcerting read.

Maybe it's something to do with the narrator. They are talking to a visitor - a doctor - and claim to be suffering from some kind of illness, though this is never properly defined. There's also a conflict between the words and the pictures (as in Pat Hutchins' Rosie's Walk): the narrator seems blithely unaware that their symptoms may be a result of the weird goings on in each room. The reader feels that something is wrong straight away and is complicit in the knowledge that the hauntings are the reason for the tummy problems, sleeping sickness and aching bones. The reader travels through the house, observing all the time, wanting to shout out to the owner "It's behind you!"...until they finally reach the attic. Now the doctor has disappeared. Where have they gone? Who is in the trunk? The book is closed; questions are left unanswered.

A disturbing ending. The house seems to have had the last laugh. As Bly did too, in its turn - and Paramore...Hundreds Hall...Hill House....they all have that last, hollow, satisfied laugh: there is no evading - or escaping - their grip.

This year, Clotilde Perrin has produced another haunted house, another interactive picture book, for a new generation. The House of Madame M, is doubly haunted - it strongly evokes the feel of the earlier Pienkowski title (and even echoes the cover with a slimy tentacle appearing from within the front door of both) as well as adding its own macabre take on the genre. This is not a stereotypical spook-house; it's weird, not altogether friendly nor comfortable, and all the better for this.

In The House of Madame M we are on another tour, this time of a witch's house. Our guide is an odd creature -  a mixture of reptile and bird -  who appears to reside there with a host of other strange inhabitants. Like Pienkowski's visiting alien and resident gorilla, they are not the stock characters associated with a traditional haunted house. There are the usual skeletons and ghosts, yes, but these things loom out of the pages with oversized eyes, gigantic hairy arms and leering grins. Their surreal presence is just as unnerving. 

The last page, as with Haunted House, leaves us with questions that will never be answered. In this book, though, it's the ultimate question - Eternity. The ailing owner of Pienkowski's house is now, forty years on, reflecting on death and the afterlife and a black humour stalks the rooms: there's a Vanitas  hanging on the sitting-room wall, mocking the emptiness of video consoles, hamburgers and mobile phones; the toilet door sports graffiti that speaks of a distinctly existential angst; the Totentanz is demonstrated by the cavortings of human skeletons. Additionally, the goddess Kali is found glaring from a bathroom cabinet beneath a picture of Persephone; anti-wrinkle cream, an elixir of youth and a 'calendar of eternity' all point to the inevitable; while a Decomposition chart in the kitchen gives a pretty accurate (but bleak) message: 'Let it happen'!

Here, there's no softening of what a haunted house really is. The jokes may be dark but, hey, the supernatural is not meant to be light work! Very few children's books manage that knife-edge balance between sly humour and outright horror that characterises some of the greatest horror fiction. There's a double caution too in children's literature by way of the question of appropriate-ness for its intended audience, so it's an even rarer beast that manages to entertain and unnerve children in equal measure. It is books that do this that are likely to spark the inclination to read horror fiction in later life; the kind of stories that linger in the mind long after reading, that shift the status quo in one's inner world, that make one question the everyday, and open the eye to those hitherto 'undreamt-of things in Heaven and Earth'.

So, if I may: don't just stick with 'fluffy' ghosts, hairy spiders and skeletons that wiggle their eyeballs for a cheap laugh this Hallowe'en - in literature, it's the truly haunted haunted-houses that you want to search out and visit.