So, whatcha reading?

October, for obvious reasons, is an optimal time of year to read or re-read horror and suspense novels.

On the advice of The Internet, I picked up a completely unfamiliar book -- a book lauded as an unsung classic of modern horror fiction. (Though it can't have been that unsung, as it was a bestseller and was made into a feature film a few years after publication.)

Perhaps it's simply because it doesn't hold up to an unfair comparison (on which, see more below), but Robert Marasco's Burnt Offerings, though not an awful read by any means, was not everything I imagined it would be. The premise isn't bad, as horror novels go: little urban family rents a beautiful, if sadly dilapidated, grand house in the country for summer vacation, and they slowly come to discover there's an evil presence in the house which automatically rejuvenates it under just the right conditions.

The "evil house" concept has been used by more than one author to advantage, but that's not really the problem with this particular book. Here's the thing about writing psychological horror: if the terrifying conditions you've created are really going to dig into your readers' minds and make it impossible for them to put the book down, you must give them a compelling reason to care about the protagonists; your readers have to want desperately for the characters to make it out of the mess alive. And Marasco simply didn't take the time to make me care about anyone in the family. From the outset, one rarely gets the feeling that the husband and wife feel anything more than mild annoyance toward each other; Ben, the husband, is barely sketched out as a harried English teacher who may be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and Marian, the wife, is teasing and shallow, obsessed with acquiring beautiful objects. The two tend to ignore their son -- who is largely a cipher -- when they aren't actively traumatizing him. Aunt Elizabeth, who could have been a sassy old broad in the right author's hands, is little more than a cigarette holder and a paintbox. I followed these people with a kind of dull curiosity, wondering merely which one would die first and how the rest would be dispatched.

Then, too, there are a number of dead ends in this book -- cul-de-sac ideas that aren't properly followed up. Before finding the main house, the family comes upon a ruined summer cottage; the son swears he saw a three-wheeled bicycle covered in dried blood next to the place. At the house, the husband finds a set of broken glasses in the bottom of the pool; they don't belong to anyone in the family and the lenses are smashed in a way that suggests unusual violence. There's no spoiler in mentioning these plot points, because neither one has any follow-up in the story. I kept expecting the gory bicycle, in particular, to turn up again because the son has very little to do and is often bored; what would be more natural for him than to go exploring around the property, and maybe to find that bicycle again? But it never happens.

I know I'm not giving the book a fair shake, because I keep comparing it to this, which I re-read last week:

I first read this book in junior high, because a very kind English teacher recommended it to me. Some books which you read and love in your early teens become guilty pleasures later in life, because as you mature you realize the books weren't really very well-written at all.

I'll never say that about anything Shirley Jackson has written. Certainly I'll never say that about We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which continues to be my favorite Jackson title. It's still remarkable; the eerie quality, the sense of something just out of one's vision being deeply wrong, does not fade with time or by comparison to other books. Even though Mary Katherine Blackwood narrates the book and we see everything that unfurls through her eyes, even though we sympathize with her at times, she is still in the end a foreign and fearsome being. The particular combination -- of disarming forthrightness with us, her readers, of making reference to singing cats, sympathetic magic rituals and claustrophobic rules and routines as though nothing could be more sensible, and of always keeping something back from us (Merricat never really regrets anything, never cries... or at least never lets us see her cry) -- adds up to one wholly unsettling little creature in an equally unsettling world.

Small moments of genius are visible throughout the book. Merricat's sister Constance seems relatively well-adjusted, but she never leaves the vicinity of her house -- and she goes upstairs to "wait" (read: hide) until the doctor has finished making his weekly visit to the invalid Uncle Julian. Uncle Julian himself is interesting to watch, especially when re-reading the book; I suspect there is a part of his foggy mind that knows more about the family catastrophe than he wants to admit, and he has routed around this knowledge, refusing to accept it, burying it under the trivia he collects endlessly for his unfinished book.

I read with some dismay that they're planning on making a movie out of We Have Always Lived in the Castle; I don't think it's possible to translate that peculiar unsettling quality to the big screen. Maybe some exceptionally deft and subtle director, with an equally deft and subtle stable of actors headed by a preternaturally gifted eighteen-year-old actress, will prove me wrong, but I doubt it.