fwriction

Happy Halloween, everyone!

The classic haunted house story – whether or not the malevolence of the house, flat, garden or bathroom is later “explained” by a forgotten grisly suicide, murder most foul or Satanist conclave scribbling pentagrams on the floor – may seem a bit on the old-fashioned side. After all, it was Baron Bulwer-Lytton, of “dark and stormy night” infamy, who kicked off the sub-genre in 1857 with “The Haunters and the Haunted”, in which a curious gentleman spends a night in a diabolical house with a sturdy servant and a prize bull-terrier. (This story has remained with me, both because of the house’s pervasive eerie chill – “I felt an exceedingly cold air pass by my cheek, like a sudden draught …” – and because the poor dog winds up having its neck wrung. It stands up surprisingly well to rereading, although I prefer the reasons for a house’s hauntedness to remain a little more shrouded in mystery than Bulwer-Lytton eventually allows.) It’s certainly true that most of my favourite haunted house stories were written in the Victorian and Edwardian periods – MR James produced several, including an intoxicatingly horrible haunted house in miniature, as did Sheridan LeFanu and Charles Dickens.