Halloween and Samhain may have already drawn their curtains against the dead for the year, but that doesn’t mean we, mere mortals, are safe from hauntings. As long as we breathe we are susceptible to any manner of ghoul that goes bump, whether its day or night. Wanting to insure I never sleep again, I spent the weeks leading up to Halloween watching Netflix’s 10-episode retelling of Shirley Jackson’s classic, The Haunting of Hill House. It surprised me that the horror series touting itself as standard haunted house fare turned out, instead, to be story of a woman’s undoing, in the vain of “The Yellow Wallpaper” or “The Turn of the Screw.”
Much has already been written about the five Crain children centered in the series, but more than them the story is about their mother, Olivia (Liv), and the fear in parenthood that can become all consuming if left unchecked: fear of losing your children. Liv frightened me beyond any other rotting, whispering, scratching, crawling ghost in the show, because she was something I could actually become, if I ever let my fears get the better of me.
When we brought our infant daughter home from hospital my first fear was SIDS. I’d hover over her, checking for breath and wishing we’d shelled out for an expensive heart beat monitor. This was (mostly) rational. Then came the irrational: something would fall on her still-soft skull while she wiggled on the floor during tummy time - a cast iron skillet, wall art; I worried I’d drop her while holding her at the top of the stairs and she’d squash like a bug on the landing; I feared kids will bully her in middle school; that she’ll grow up and the apocalypse will arrive and she’ll die in a terrible combination of dragon fire and drowning tidal waves. Normal stuff.
A ghost whispers to mom-of-five Olivia Crain in Hill House about the horrors the world is waiting to unleash on her youngest children, twins Luke and Nell.
In the show, Nell asks her mother, Liv, if Liv would wake her up if she and her twin brother, Luke, had terrible nightmares about themselves as struggling, drug-addicted, grief-stricken, dying adults. Liv, visibly disturbed, promises that “of course” she would wake them. One of Hill House’s many ghosts appears then, whispering into Liv’s ear that she’s found the “secret” for keeping children safe, forever. She whispers the solution too quiet for us to hear, but by Liv’s face, we have a clear idea of the dead’s solution for eternal childhood.
The whispering ghosts revisited me as I read Samantha Hunt’s short story, “A Love Story,” in her collection The Dark Dark. In the story, an unnamed narrator, a suburban mother who we know little about beyond that she has three kids she juggles with an unnamed career, is waiting in bed for her husband to check on a sound she heard outside. Or he’s been gone an unspecified amount of time because she kicked him out over fears of infidelity. The scenario, like much of what the woman says, is unclear, hazy through the lens of memory and filtered through the fear she feels being alone in the dark house with all sorts of real and imagined terrors just outside the walls. The story opens with the woman recollecting another story she’d been told about a coyote taking away a child. Coyotes are tricksters, scavengers, and night dwellers, the animal embodiment of ghosts just waiting to screw with you. But it’s the idea of the coyote taking a child that sends the narrator down a dark thought-spiral as she questions her choice to bring babies into the world where they could be “chopped into bits,” or, worse, destroy any sense of identity she once had about herself.
“Who are you? The answer is easy in daylight. But the night’s untethering almost always turns me into someone I’m not. I sift through the different women I become in the dark, my own private Greek chorus of whispers, shrieks. Where do I keep all these women when the sun is up? Where do they hide, the women who have breached the sanctity of my home, who know things about me so secret even I don’t know these things?”
Cover for Samantha Hunt’s collection The Dark Dark. I love this cover - a Rorschach test that looks like a face, or a child-bearing pelvis, with coyote prey wandering clueless in the night.
The narrator’s Greek chorus reminds me of Hill House’s ghosts, and the way they whisper into Liv’s ear suggestions far more frightening than their own presence. Are the ghosts or the chorus really there, if no one else can see them? Or is Liv simply going mad in her isolation, dwelling on her abandoned dreams of becoming an architect? The world crushed her dreams, so why wouldn’t it do the same to her children? The chorus manifested as ghosts inside the house tell her that removal is the only assurance of safety. Hunt’s narrator, though, won’t give us the easy answer of “motherhood” as the scapegoat of womanly maladies:
“I used to think it was motherhood that loosens a woman’s grasp on sanity. Now I see it is the surplus and affluence of America. Plus something else, something toxic, leaking poison, fear. Something we can’t yet see.”
It’s fitting that Hill House is an opulent mansion in decay, affluence-made-manifest that refuses to yield its riches to middle class interlopers, like the Crain family. It fights back against their restoration work with water, black mold, and storms; its wealth is not to be shared by those not in the upper tiers of American society. The Crain family are to be consumed, not elevated to the class of consumers. Echoes of Poe rise from the chorus, speaking of decaying mansions and families driven mad by the poison of their hyper-protected wealth.
Theodore McCombs’s short story, “Talk to Your Children about Two-Tongued Jeremy,” in Lightspeed Magazine, also tackles American capitalism, parenting, and ghosts of a different sort, but still of our own making. Jeremy, a monitor lizard I picture as a back-alley version of the Geico gecko, is the AI face of an expensive tutoring app used by the upper echelon children of Declaration Middle, a prep school situated atop a hill in a sleepy, “idyllic” town. At the bottom of the hill, always in the background, is the town’s psychiatric institution, waiting. The only named parents in the story are dead, leaving their son, David Marzipan, a Declaration Middle student and avid user of the Jeremy learning app. The parents who speak in the story are a collective, a Greek Chorus unto themselves, decrying the dark turn Jeremy takes to whip children into fighting shape for the dark, dark world of cut-throat stock brokers and politicians, defending themselves against any wrongdoing in pushing Jeremy straight into their children’s laps. These parents are like Liv and Hunt’s suburban mom: normal: they want the best for their children and fear the world’s harshness. They want their children to succeed. They worry about someone or something taking them away in the night:
“We checked our own children in their beds. We didn’t turn on even the hall lights; we wanted to catch death glowing in a mist over them and blast it with the leaf blower.”
In Hill House, the parents’ mistakes haunt the children for life, and in McCombs’s story, the same happens: David recreates his parents in his head, a psychological haunting:
“He constructed a passionate, ambitious, critical voice in his head as a monument to them, and it punished him without pattern or reason: This fricking idiot can’t merge, it snapped, gesturing down at him, then added, I can’t believe how bad he is!”
The haunting intensifies as Jeremy, the AI monitor lizard, takes on the worst personification of these memories, goading and threatening David to study harder, abandon his friends, isolate himself with the app and his books to become someone worthwhile. Isolation always intensifies a haunting, as it does with the Crain family of Hill House, with Hunt’s narrator, alone on her bed in the night, and in this story, with a child afraid of the repercussions of both denying his fear and what lies in wait at the end of the road if he continues giving in to the fear.
The parents in Two-Tongued Jeremy are not so dissimilar from Hill House’s Liv, both cementing the future they fear for their children as they fight tooth and nail against it, all Oedipal tragedies in the making, with children as victims of the parents’ ghosts.
Not to discourage any prospective parents from following through with plans to have children: as Hill House teaches us, if you don’t have children to haunt and let haunt you, you’ll just be haunted by the mistakes of your parents forever – so settle in with the ghosts and get comfy! If literature has something to say on the subject, they aren’t going anywhere. It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Each of these stories also shows us that the course of events can always be changed based on the choices the characters ultimately make – some good, some murderous.
Oedipus is dissatisfied with the way things shook out for his parents and his kids.
As Hunt’s narrator-mom says:
“This family is the biggest experiment I’ve ever been part of, an experiment called: How do you let someone in?”
I’d add to that, how do you let someone in without letting in all the scary stuff of the world, too? I had a baby and invited in all of the fears that came with it, but she’s sure been worth it. Still, I have to let her watch Sesame Street for an hour every afternoon, because that’s when I serve tea and little cakes to the ghosts that barreled in with her. Halloween may be past, but my fear-ghosts didn’t get the memo. We’ve made a tentative peace, though, as long as I keep the tea pot flowing and a cushy chair open.
As if scary ghosts weren’t bad enough, Netflix used this song as Hill House end credits solely to make me cry, jerks: “If I Go, I’m Going” by Boulder musician Gregory Alan Isakov (who if you haven’t seen when he plays with the Colorado Symphony, what are you doing with your life?). Isakov’s newest single is called “Dark, Dark, Dark” so I think he was channeling some Samantha Hunt when he wrote it.
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There is so much out there to read, and until you get your turn in a time loop, you don’t have time to read it all to find the highlights.