Category: reading

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

* * * *

Eleanor Vance was thirty-two years old… The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends. This was owing largely to the eleven years she had spent caring for her invalid mother, which had left her with some proficiency as a nurse and an inability to face strong sunlight without blinking. She could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair.

* * * *

It was the first genuinely shining day of summer, a time of year which brought Eleanor always to aching memories of her early childhood, when it had seemed to be summer all the time; she could not remember a winter before her father’s death on a cold wet day. She had taken to wondering lately, during these swift-counted years, what had been done with all those wasted summer days; how could she have spent them so wantonly? I am foolish, she told herself early every summer, I am very foolish; I am grown up now and know the values of things. Nothing is ever really wasted, she believed sensibly, even one’s childhood, and then each year, one summer morning, the warm wind would come down the city street where she walked and she would be touched with the little cold thought: I have let more time go by. Yet this morning, driving the little car which she and her sister owned together, apprehensive lest they might still realize that she had come after all and just taken it away, going docilely along the street, following the lines of traffic, stopping when she was bidden and turning when she could, she smiled out at the sunlight slanting along the street and thought, I am going, I am going, I have finally taken a step.
 
— from The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Eleanor is going to Hill House. What do you suppose will happen when she gets there?

If you have not read this book then I envy you, as I do anyone experiencing a good story for the first time. Read it. It’s short and powerful, frightening not with blood or gore but only through the slow revelations of the fears and madness that people carry inside.

And do see the fabulous 1963 movie The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise and starring Julie Harris as Eleanor. But do not see the stinky terrible deeply stupid horrible bad 1999 remake, ick ick ick.

I’ve always loved Jackson’s work; she was an awesome writer, spare and specific and very good at capturing the superficial interactions of people with all the tar bubbling underneath. She’s a writer that new writers can learn from — about economy, how to report things about a character without stooping to the dreaded “telling,” how to show the nuances of sexual tension or fear or rebellion without pounding it into the reader’s head.

So I was delighted back in 1998 to be invited by Ellen Datlow, fiction editor of OMNI, to take part in a round robin story with Graham Joyce, Ed Bryant and Kathe Koja. The conceit of round robin is that each writer takes a turn with the story, writing a short entry (500 -700 words) as quickly as possible, then passing it along to the next person.

We decided our story should be an hommage to Shirley Jackson, and that’s how we started it, although I think it drifted fairly quickly (grin). It was a fascinating experience working with these folks. I enjoyed coming home from my work at Wizards of the Coast, grabbing a beer on my way downstairs to my basement office, turning on the computer, reading whatever entry had been handed off to me, and then…. just beginning. Exhilarating stuff. Here it is, if you’d like to read it. But, straight up, Jackson is better (grin).

I am going, I am going, I have finally taken a step — who among us does not know that feeling? It’s a pull like leaning over the roof edge of a very tall building. It’s the thrill when everything you know disappears in the rearview mirror and you are clean and new, you could be anyone, and nothing you’ve left behind can touch you. It’s only what’s ahead that will shape you now. Or at least, that’s what we want so badly to believe. Jackson knows better; and Eleanor will find out that we always bring ourselves on these journeys.

The best novella I know is “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” by Stephen King. It was made into a brilliant movie, but the novella is even better.

It’s about hope. I talk a lot about hope, mostly in ambivalent ways. But perhaps I am coming to some conclusions. Perhaps there are different kinds of hope, like mushrooms, some that are truffles and some that will kill you dead.

“Shawshank” is the most comprehensive, brutal, joyful examination I’ve ever read of the different kinds of hope. The hope like a rattlesnake you keep insisting makes a really good pet until it bites you hard and then coils away looking for its next meal. The hope that is indistinguishable from fear. The hope that relies on magical thinking, if only… And there is the hope that is the first cousin of will, that sees you to the end of a long hard road.

When I was learning to swim, the instructor would step back ten feet from where I clung to the edge of the pool, and hold out his arms, and smile: swim to me, he would say, and I would throw myself out and gasp and thrash and paddle like hell, and he would step back and back and back, and I had to keep going. But he was always there at the end. That is perhaps the only hope that has ever really done me any good, the hope that makes me willing to keep swimming because there will be something at the end that is risk rewarded, that is safety and triumph and relief and a new kind of knowledge of myself and the world. Not if only, but rather if I do…

Dear Red,
 
If you’re reading this, then you’re out. One way or another, you’re out. And if you’ve followed along this far, you might be willing to come a little further. I think you remember the name of the town, don’t you? I could use a good man to help me get my project on wheels. Meanwhile, have a drink on me — and do think it over. I will be keeping an eye out for you. Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. I will be hoping that this letter finds you, and finds you well.
 
I didn’t read that letter in the field [… ] I went back to my room and read it there, with the smell of old men’s dinners drifting up the stairwell to me — Beefaroni, Rice-a-Roni, Noodle Roni. You can be that whatever the old folks of America, the ones on fixed incomes, are eating tonight, it almost certainly ends in roni.
 
I opened the envelope and read the letter and then I put my head in my arms and cried. With the letter there were twenty new fifty-dollar bills.
 
And here I am in the Brewster Hotel, technically a fugitive from justice again — parole violation is my crime. No one’s going to throw up any roadblocks to catch a criminal wanted on that charge, I guess — wondering what I should do now.
 
I have this manuscript. I have a small piece of luggage about the size of a doctor’s bag that holds everything I own. I have nineteen fifties, four tens, a five, three ones, and assorted change. I broke one of the fifties to buy this tablet of paper and a deck of smokes.
 
Wondering what I should do.
 
But there’s really no question. It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying.
 
–from “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” by Stephen King
 

Here’s a little literary fun for a holiday weekend. This is from Poetry for Cats: Tthe Definitive Anthology of Distinguished Feline Verse, by Henry Beard. It’s a lovely, clever collection of poems, ostensibly written by famous poets’ cats, which is brilliant both as hommage and as a study of feline psychology.

Here’s a taste. Enjoy.

To A Vase
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Cat

 

How do I break thee? Let me count the ways.
I break thee if thou art at any height
My paw can reach, when, smarting from some slight,
I sulk, or have one of my crazy days.
I break thee with an accidental graze
Or twitch of tail, if I should take a fright.
I break thee out of pure and simple spite
The way I broke the jar of mayonnaise.
I break thee if a bug upon thee sits.
I break thee if I’m in a playful mood,
And then I wrestle with the shiny bits.
I break thee if I do not like my food.
And if someone thy shards together fits,
I’ll break thee once again when thou art glued.

 

— from Poetry for Cats by Henry Beard