恐怖文学的魅力：乔·希尔与维克多·拉瓦勒的深度对谈

This week, we're staying on October vibes and presenting you with a couple of conversations from years past with great horror writers.

First from 2024, Joe Hill, who has just released his first novel in almost a decade, King Sorrow, came on the Pod.

Great conversation. He offered a bunch of fantastic scary book recommendations.

And then after the break, Victor Laval, author of 2023's Lone Women, talks about the book he's read the most in his life, a book I have read many times, The Great Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.

I hope you enjoyed both of these conversations.

I absolutely did and I doubly hope that you look forward to next week's episode of the podcast in which MJ Franklin, as he does every month, hosts a book club discussion.

This one about this year's The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Steven Graham Jones.

But first, let's turn to Joe Hill.

Joe Hill, author, novelist, short story writer, has worked in the graphic novel space.

The first time I read you before interviewing you, I feel like years ago for Time magazine for Horns, this was a very long time ago,

was 20th Century Ghost, which is a short story collection.

And I don't know if I said this at the time, but it has stuck with me.

I was listening to it. I was listening to the audiobook version of 20th Century Ghost.

And the first story in 20th Century Ghost is a story called Best New Horror if I'm recalling correctly.

And it was so tense that I was genuinely sweating on a New York City subway platform.

And I wasn't sweating cuz it was summertime and it gets to be 97 degrees on these platforms.

I think it was a different time of year.

It was just it was very tense. Very tense.

And then several stories later, there's a story called Pop Art, which was one of the more moving pieces of short fiction I've read in a horror collection ever.

Maybe it was a great delight to see the range there.

That's very kind.

I remember that we spoke in a restaurant in Boston around 2010 for horns.

and shortly afterwards I had a nervous breakdown and a divorce.

So, Gilbert, I'm hoping this conversation has a better outcome.

I don't want to lay all that on you, but I'm not taking you completely off the hook.

Clearly, we had this conversation and two years later, I was a divorced guy in therapy and so

anyway, no pressure here.

What happened?

I'm so sorry.

I feel like you should have told me this earlier this

going into the conversation.

Yeah, this might be the first time we've spoken since then.

I'll keep you updated after this conversation.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Great.

Thank you.

Welcome to the book review podcast.

Thanks for having me on.

It's wonderful to be here.

This is such a silly question given who you are and how you grew up, but what has your relationship to scary books been from the time you were a child?

We're here to talk about scary books.

It is quite literally a lifelong relationship with the scary stuff.

So, the elephant in the room is my dad is Stephen King.

A fact that I was able to keep secret for a period of time in the early part of my career while I was finding my own voice and starting to publish.

But I'm a huge Stephen King fan and fell hard for my dad's work like so many other children of the 1980s and read everything.

And the thing is people they think of it as a long book but I read it in second draft and manuscript.

and that thing that manuscript was like came to my knee.

I was shorter then but I wasn't that short.

It was a huge manuscript and certainly I was swept away by that story.

How how old were you when you read that book which has a lot of

young far too young. Yeah,

I think I was 12.

If you look at the date the book came out and subtract two years

86 maybe.

Okay.

So I read it in 1984 and I would have been 12.

Okay.

I I was talking to a friend recently and I said in some ways I feel like I've been trying to write it my whole life.

My third book Noseratu Mhm. was a stab my attempt to write it.

I've got a new one that'll be out next year called King Sorrow where I was trying to write it.

I think I did a short story called The Black Phone that was in 20th Century Ghost and at the time I wrote it, it was the furthest thing from my mind, but when I look at it now, I see the influence of that book all over that story.

What did you take from that book?

It's a big book. There's a lot to take from it, but what do you think are the elements that keep coming back over and over in your writing?

I learned pretty early on that effective horror is not about sadism.

It's not about throwing a pile of guts at the reader.

Effective horror is about giving you some characters to fall in love with.

Introducing fully rounded characters who feel like you would want to you would want to spend time with them and you're going to spend time with them because it usually takes between 12 and 20 hours to read a book.

So you you meet some characters and you fall in love with them and then you see them forced to confront the worst that we can imagine.

And so in that sense, I think good horror fiction is about sympathy. It's about empathy, not cruelty.

That isn't always so clearly understood.

And so I think when you look at the horror movies of the 1980s, the slasher films of the 1980s, you see a lot of movies that are terrible horror films but great slapstick comedies.

The Friday the 13th films, for example, every character in those movies is one-dimensional.

You've got the cheerleader, you've got the jock, you've got the stoner, you've got the the good girl who studies and is saving her virginity for marriage.

All of the tropes that were made fun of in the film Cabin in the Woods.

Absolutely.

And none of these characters have any depth to them.

You never really care about them as human beings or even see them as fully rounded human beings.

And so it actually becomes somewhat entertaining to watch Jason Vorhees work his way through them with one ghoulish murder after another.

We respond to that exactly the same way we respond to a Warner Brothers cartoon where, you know, Bugs Bunny smashes a sledgehammer into Daffy Duck's head. Mhm.

The difference between a Three Stooges film and some of the later Friday the 13th films is very fine.

A lot of eyes getting poked.

Yeah, exactly.

That thing where Mo takes a sledgehammer to Curley's head. You see that scene and you shout with laughter.

You're watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Leatherface takes a sledgehammer to some teenager's head and blood flies all over the camera and you scream.

But you're responding fundamentally to the same scene.

It's actually the same scene.

And I also think it's interesting that in both cases you respond with this kind of reptile brain vocalization, something that's deeper than than words, a scream or a laugh.

I was describing this phenomenon or this response mechanism to someone recently.

I saw a movie called In a Violent Nature.

I haven't seen it yet, but I'm pretty excited for it.

Which for many people listening, do not watch this movie.

This movie is not for most people, but I will talk to Joe here about it because it is for him.

And there's a scene in that movie I was watching at Home Alone late at night where I did the thing you just described where I went, "Oh, I started making sounds that I was not expecting to and I was not prepared to, but I could not help myself."

Yeah, that is a mark of course of an effective moment because it's cut right through your conscious the fortress of your conscious mind and got to something deeper and has reminded you that were animals on the face of the planet and terrible things can happen to us if we get in the way of a buzzing chainsaw.

It's a very odd thing to to laugh to.

It is.

And it's weird.

It's weird that we want this. It's weird that we want to spend a weekend with a frightening novel, someone facing a dreadful scenario.

Why would we want to read these stories of someone lost in a dark basement with a vampire or something and something that's going to make it hard for us to sleep?

There is a a Dutch writer named Matias Lawson who's written a book called How Horror Seduces. That's one of the better non-fiction works on the genre in the last quarter century.

and he studies horror fiction from the viewpoint of evolutionary psychology.

And his attitude about horror fiction is it's much like when children play hideand- seek or tag because hide-and-seek and tag are are play versions of predator and prey.

It's chasing and being chased.

Children find this terrifically entertaining, but there have been times and places in history when knowing how to hide fast was extremely useful for small human beings.

And by the same token, I think that we read horror fiction as rehearsal, that we study horror fiction because in the safe playground of our imagination, we can explore frightening questions about our own mortality and our own well-being that in everyday life we normally don't want to confront.

The example I use is there's obviously, you know, a terrific passion for stories about vampires of all sorts from from glittering vampires to drooling noseratu.

And spoiler alert, you're never going to face a vampire in real life.

They don't exist.

No blood sucker is going to come by your house in the middle of the night, you know, get a pint of blood.

I'm slightly disappointed, but continue.

I know.

I know I'm a heartbreaker, but many people in their lives will wrestle with something like cancer.

Cancer is an invisible adversary that that wants to take your life and will can weaken you day by day and it's not clear how to fight it and it's frightening and puts you right up in the face of your own mortality.

Cancer is a vampire.

And when we read a story about people fighting fighting off a vampire, I think that we're engaged in a kind of rehearsal about what sort of choices would I make if some invisible adversary was preying on my life and my time was running out.

Mhm.

How would I want to be in the world if I felt my strength ebbing away and was in this fight for my life that there was a good chance I might lose?

Also, what do moments of great stress reveal about a person?

What would it reveal about me?

Absolutely.

How would I cope?

And we're drawn to these questions because we want to prepare for the big moments ahead of time before it's too late.

We want to have some idea about what is admirable behavior, what is wholesome behavior, what is emotionally healthy behavior, and what's destructive and damaging and useless and counterproductive.

I think most people don't want to go out like the Paul Riser character in Aliens shutting doors on his fellows and running to save his own ass and everyone else be damned.

One of the great cowards.

Yeah, one of the great cowards of horror cinema.

Whereas whereas Bill Paxton, the Bill Paxton character in Aliens who seems like such a coward, actually has this moment at the end when suddenly he grabs his courage with both hands and he's standing there with the aliens running at him saying, "You want some?

You want some, too?

How about you?"

And I think most of us feel like, "Okay, if I was in that scenario, I'd be just as terrified as him, but I hope in my last moments, I'd make my stand."

So, we're here to talk about horror fiction, but first I want to ask you, given the season, given that Halloween is part of the reason that we're having this conversation, what is Halloween for you?

I think the thing about Halloween, and I I'm a New England guy, I live in New Hampshire.

And the thing about Halloween is it's all about the buildup.

The joy is all in the buildup.

The leaves are turning, the mornings are crisp, nothing tastes better than the first cup of tea.

And every Friday night, you watch a new horror film.

You plan ahead. So you've got your whole horror film festival worked out.

You pick some reading that's appropriate for the season.

So at the moment I'm reading the best ghost stories of Algenon Blackwood.

It's the first time I've read him since I was a teenager.

It's all early 20th century.

It has a kind of Edwardian Victorian feel to it.

So it's just right. It feels just perfect for the season.

Tasteful but frightening. Mhm.

And and then you have the big night and the kids go out and they get dressed and run from house to house collecting candy.

That's fun. That's fine.

But sort of like opening your presents on Christmas morning, the anticipation and the buildup is where all the real pleasure is.

That is perfectly put.

I want to talk about some books that you would recommend for the season.

You just mentioned the stories of Aldron Blackwood, but I know you have a few more that you wanted to dip into.

The first one is Lost Man's Lane by Scott Carson.

Who is Scott Carson?

Not who he appears to be.

Scott Carson is a pen name for the thriller writer Michael Karita.

Michael's probably best known for a novel under his own name called Those Who Wish Me Dead, which was made into an intense backwoods thriller starring Angelina Jolie,

but he does write other novels under the name Scott Carson.

His Michael Karita thrillers are all mainstream thrillers set in the world as we understand it.

But the Scott Carson books indulge in his love of supernatural fiction.

Lost Man's Lane is probably the best of the Scott Carson books to date.

So if you loved Stranger Things, you will love Lost Man's Lane.

It has something of the same feel to it.

It has some of the texture of a young adult novel, but is also very much for grown-ups. something like Stranger Things.

It is set not the 1980s like Stranger Things, but at the at the tail end of the 1990s

and occasional historical events intrude in quite striking ways.

They're all pllopped in front of the TV on the day that Coline happens.

And one of the most moving moments in the story is when one of the parents says to the kids, "We will never let this happen again."

And that's the most frightening moment in the book sent a shiver right through me.

But the story is about a young man on the day he gets his driver's license.

He's pulled over by the police for going just slightly over the speed limit. The cop who pulls him over is a terrifying bully and there's something off about him.

And gradually we are forced to conclude that he's had an encounter with a police officer who is 50 or 60 or 70 years out of time.

Someone who has popped into the 1990s from all the way back in the 1940s or 1950s.

And this person and that this person who is hop skipping through time is also responsible for a number of murders.

There's also I mentioned it has a little bit of the quality of a young adult story.

There's also the best supernatural snake in this story since the snake in the Harry Potter books.

What's the name of the snake?

Neagini.

Yes.

Yes.

Okay.

So, number one and number two on a list of two.

Yes.

Exactly.

It's sort of like Jaws 2 is the absolute second best shark film.

It's on actually a huge list.

Yeah.

So,

so that's a great recommendation.

The writing is light and witty.

The pages turn swiftly.

Because Michael is a thriller writer in the mold of a Harlon Cobin or a Lynwood Barlay, he also has a little dash of Dennis Leane in him.

And because that's the world of writing he comes from, there are a lot of very satisfying twists, a lot of, you know, really stunning, oh, I can't believe that just happened.

And the art is in having those reversals and twists and then getting to the end of the book and feeling like they were all earned.

Yeah.

That it wasn't just it wasn't just a twist to shock you and keep you moving.

Do you feel as someone who has read more than most perhaps and has written a lot and has to think about plotting and structure and twists and turns and surprises. Do you find that when you actually encounter a genuine one in fiction, it remains delightful?

The idea that someone can still come up with a twist that can confound even someone who's read hundreds and hundreds of books.

The really good ones are miraculous.

Probably the writer who is best at the mindblowing twist is the crime and thriller writer Anthony Horowitz, who also dabbles in horror.

Some of his fiction is horror.

Has he written Sherlock Holmes books?

Am I Is that the same person?

He has.

He has. He wrote a book called Morardi.

I was reading it aloud to my wife and it had one twist that was so ingenious and so stunning.

She didn't believe it had really happened.

She thought I was making it up just to upset and perturb her.

And she snatched the book out of my hands to read it for herself to make sure it was really on the page.

So that's the power of a really good twist.

All I can speak of is my own work when it comes to this sort of thing.

I'm not an outliner.

I don't plan the books ahead.

When I have pulled off a satisfying twist, the first person it surprised was me. before it ever surprised a reader.

It was a decision that one of my characters made or some kind of revelation where I was completely stunned for that to just fly onto the page.

And how does that come to you?

You're sitting there and it happens.

Are you in the shower?

Are you on a walk?

It usually happens while you're writing.

So, it's usually it's not something that just occurs to you while you're out for a walk.

My view of it is you have a situation.

I wrote a story about a man who has a collection of disturbing artifacts.

So he has a trey panned human skull.

He has a witch's confession.

He has a snuff film.

And he hears about a woman selling a ghost online and he decides he has to have it for his collection.

Now, if you ever read even a single horror story, you know what a terrible idea this is.

But the the guy buys it.

In my case, it was this death metal rocker named Judas Coin who's in his mid60s.

This was my first book, Heart-Shaped Box.

And when I wrote the story, I thought it was going to be a short story called Dead Man's Suit, because I was sure that he was the guy.

When we first meet Jude, he's sort of an angry creep and a belligerent creep.

And I thought he would buy this ghost online and it would eat him for breakfast by page 30 and I'd sell another short story for 500 bucks.

But Jude turned out to be like a cockroach.

Every time I stepped on him, I'd lift my shoe and he'd scuttle away again.

Every time he survived, it surprised me all over again.

But the reason he surprised is because I was projecting myself into his psychology and his views, his whole sort of persona.

And he kept making choices that were perfectly natural for him, but were surprising to me because they were never the choices that I would have made in the same situation.

So, I think that's how a reveal or a a shock can work if you don't outline for it.

Maybe Michael outlines.

I'd have to I'd have to ask him.

I've spoken to him a few times.

The next two books on your list, Fever House and The Devil by Name are by Keith Rosson.

And the first one in particular has a classic conceit, which is that there's an evil severed head.

We've all been there.

Yeah.

And the Fever House, and it's just out in hardcover sequel, The Devil by Name, is absolutely bonkers. Gonzo horror.

Every scene, every chapter is more bananas than the one before.

And somehow it all works and is propulsive and tremendously exciting.

When Fever House begins, we're with two enforcers, two two goons who work for a criminal syndicate, and they've come to collect some money from a methhead.

Well, when they go to collect, they discover a severed hand in his ice box.

And the severed hand works on you a little bit like bath salts. It's druglike and has power over your reactions in your mind.

There's something addictive about being close to it, but it also makes you incredibly violent. makes you want to hurt everyone around you and respond to the slightest setback by reaching for the closest baseball bat.

And on one endless rainy night in Portland, Oregon, this severed hand, which might be the severed hand of a devil, begins to move across Portland, move across the city, being passed from one person to another and creating more and more chaos.

It turns out that the severed hand is one of three remnants.

There's also a tape recording that drives people crazy, a voice, a tape recording of a voice that drives people crazy to hear it.

And there's an eyeball, an eyeball of a devil, and if you look into this eyeball, you see how you yourself will die.

Somehow, I knew this conversation would be very different from views I've had throughout the rest of the year.

The Fever House is an ingenious work of writing.

It has the energy of early punk rock.

It has something of a punk rock ethos.

It's very in-your-face.

It has a tremendous cast of characters.

There is a pair of feds that read like a twisted version of Moulder and Scully from the XFiles.

There is an angel that's being held under conditions that make Guantanamo Bay look like the Hilton.

Did you say an angel?

Yes, an angel.

And occasionally people with the secretive government agency take a hacksaw to his wings to force him to talk.

So that's savage.

I don't know what to make of this.

This is all in one book.

This is all in one book.

There is a former rock and roll singer who is now almost incapable of leaving her apartment and she's a bit like Patty Smith.

She's tough and highly intelligent but in this case she's also crippled by her anxieties.

You have this whole world.

It it actually I have actually sometimes described it as the pulp fiction of horror novels

in the sense that you have this kaleidoscopic ensemble of characters on a whole spectrum of scummyiness and all of them are whirling about in this one city in this one incredibly rainy night while our whole world spins out of control and this hand spreads rage, madness, and chaos across Portland, Oregon.

The ending is so outrageous I won't speak of it.

Thank you.

I will say the devil by name. The followup presents us with a world that has been profoundly changed.

Fever house is set in our world as we understand it with the supernatural intruding on life as we know it.

And the devil by name is something of the reverse where the real world is now intruding on a world that has been changed by the power of the supernatural.

That was a superb recommendation.

I recommend

the job is taken.

The last thing I'll say about it is because I think this matters to a lot of readers.

The last thing I'll say about it is the pages of Fever House and the Devil by Name fly by so quickly, you're in constant danger of paper cuts.

And I think that matters cuz I think good horror fiction needs to move.

Stuff has got to happen.

And there's certainly not time for a lot of introspection in the work of Keith Rosson.

There's some though.

I feel like the next and last book you're going to talk about probably has a little bit of that.

It's totally completely different, quite serious, quite frightening.

This is a book called The Reformatory.

Yeah, The Reformatory by Tanana Reef Du is just out in paperback.

It also just won the World Fantasy Award for best novel.

I think that's wonderful, but hardly surprising.

The Reformatory is probably one of the two or three best horror novels published in this century so far.

It is set in the early 1950s in the south and it's about a black kid who gets in a tustling match with a white kid after her sister is insulted.

This black kid winds up in a reformatory that is as terrifying as the Overlook Hotel and just as haunted.

And gradually it becomes clear that if this kid doesn't get out of the reformatory in a hurry, he will not live to be 15.

The book is has a lot to say about the early civil rights movement and about what it was like to be black in the south in the middle of the 20th century.

I thought I knew that story and it turned out there was a whole bunch I did not know. Mhm.

It's also just a damn fine horror novel, you know, scary, zippy, full of fraught, tense set pieces.

Our lead character encounters a number of ghosts in the reformatory, and those encounters are chilling and also emotionally powerful.

These are moments that have something to say about the tragedy of so many of the kids who were sent to, for example, the Doure School for Boys who never left, who walked through that door and never walked back out.

And probably the highest praise I can give the book just about is, boy, it reads like a Stephen King novel, you know?

I mean, it's it's just it's got that energy, that vividness, and that heart.

And I was completely blown away.

I read the book probably a year ago and I think about it all the time.

I have one more question for you that I didn't prepare you for, but I am curious given you have you have kids.

What do you think are good entry points?

Goosebumps aside, we know the work of Arl Stein is a gateway drug for kids into horror.

But what do you give younger people maybe who want to that's not it, but who want to dip into this stuff?

I think the gateway drug for horror fiction for kids who are maybe 10, 11, and to any parents listening, I am not the parent of your kid and you have to make your own decisions about what your kid is appropriate for.

So, take any advice from me with a grain of salt.

You know,

you legally protected.

Thank you.

Yeah, you know what your kid can handle and I don't.

That said, there is a work of dark fantasy by a writer named John Bolair's called The House with a Clock in Its Walls.

There was a film.

I haven't seen the film because I desperately wanted to write the screenplay and I never got a chance to and I'm so disgusted someone else got to have that pleasure instead that just I'm just rejecting the film.

I'm pretending the film doesn't exist on personal grounds.

The book is a masterpiece of dark fantasy and I would look for any of the editions that were illustrated by Edward Gory who illustrated the original edition as part of the joy of the book.

marvelous illustrations, but it is about a young boy named Lewis Barnvelt who like so many kids in young adult novels has been orphaned and he goes to live with his uncle in I want to say New Zebedee, Connecticut.

It turns out that his uncle is a sorcerer and that the house is full of magical artifacts.

And in the course of trying to impress another boy, Lewis accidentally cast some gets involved with necromancy and raises the spirit of evil, terrible person.

And I've read that book.

I've probably read House with Clock and it walls a dozen times over the course of my life.

And I think it has some incredibly chilling scenes, but still within the range of what an imaginative, good humored 11-year-old can cope with.

It's the masterpiece of fantasy that JK Rowling never wrote.

I I would put House with Clock on his walls comfortably ahead of any of the Harry Potter novels.

I read those books in those editions that you're describing.

I remember the illustrations quite well.

Well, I think there was one John Belair's book, not illustrated by Edward Gorey, that genuinely gave me bad dreams for years.

I think it was from the letter of the witch in the ring.

But do you think John Belair's is still discussed these days?

I feel like uh you don't hear it as much about him as maybe you should.

I think he's mostly dropped out of the conversation and that's too bad.

He's someone who deserves to be rediscovered because the work is so great.

That book in particular, The House with the Clock and Walls in particular is really one of the classics of childhood fantasy just as much as The Phantom Pole Booth or The Black Cauldron,

Mhm.

The Lion Witch in the Wardrobe.

It is in that class, that very elite class of lasting, timeless stories of childhood wonder, Darkness, and the Fantastic.

And I'm pretty sure that house with a clock on his moss at least is still in print.

Joe Hill, thank you so much for coming on the book review podcast to recommend a bunch of great scary books for the season.

This was a real delight.

Good.

It was a pleasure.

Thanks for talking to me.

That was my conversation from last October with Joe Hill, who has just released his first novel in almost a decade, King Sorrow.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back.

I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and I am presenting you now with a conversation that I had with a great writer from two years ago, Victor Laval, who wrote a piece of historical horror fiction called Lone Women.

He is talking about Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.

Alongside Henry James' The Turn of the Screw and Stephen King's The Shining, The Haunting of Hill House, published in 1959, is one of the seminal haunted house stories of the 20th century.

It tells a tale of Eleanor Vance, a 32-year-old woman who is invited to the Titular Hill House by a psychic investigator who has gathered a small group of people to try to gather actual proof of the existence of paranormal phenomena.

Eleanor, who had spent years essentially cut off from the world as she cared for her now deceased mother, previously experienced an unexplained event when she was 12 when stones fell on her house for three days.

This quartet of people, Eleanor, Dr. Montigue, a woman named Theo, who is clairvoyant, and Luke, who's the heir to the house, experience increasingly creepy incidents as they begin to wonder what's real and what's not, as we begin to wonder what's real and what's not, and whether or not one of them is actually responsible.

Victor, I'd love it if you can read the first paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House.

I'm happy to.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sainely under conditions of absolute reality.

Even larks and cattyids are supposed by some to dream.

Hillhouse, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within.

It had stood so for 80 years and might stand for 80 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.

Yeah,

I love that.

One of the great opening paragraphs.

Talk to me about that paragraph.

Number one, it's just so beautiful, beautifully written.

And I think one of the great things about Shirley Jackson is the way that she finds a way to she writes about the fantastical, the supernatural, and all the rest, but she does it with such beautiful sentences.

And it's it's a real gift, number one.

But it's that opening line in that paragraph that is really like the thematic, the organizing principle of the entire book.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sely under conditions of absolute reality.

And that turns out to be essentially the test that is put to our main character, Eleanor.

We see her because she's our real main character.

We spend a great deal of time in her head as she's trying to parse out like what's actually happening and what isn't happening, but even more, what do I feel?

What do I want?

What do I not want?

Do I really understand myself or not?

And it's a kind of debate she's having with herself throughout the book.

And by the end, I would say the choice she makes, I don't want to ruin it for anybody, but the choice she makes is almost her final reaction to the absolute reality of who she is and what her circumstances are.

And it's right there in the opening sentence.

And that paragraph is repeated at the end of the book, as I recall.

That's right.

And I think it's just like a refrain that comes back, but by the end of the book, hopefully you understand it very differently because of the choice that Eleanor has made.

And it's spooky in the beginning and at the end it's heartbreaking.

Talk to me about the first time you read this book or the earliest memory that you have of reading this book.

Tell me everything where you got it. Was it did you buy it?

Was it at the library?

Do you still have that copy?

What you thought then?

The whole McGill.

Well, it actually begins before Shirley Jackson.

It begins with Stephen King and his book Dance Macabra, which was his 80s summary of the horror field in general.

And as a kid who was in love with Stephen King at the time, but who was not supremely well read, I treated that book like, as many people did, I'm sure, like a just a list, a bibliography.

Here's everything you got to read.

And for better or worse, Shirley Jackson's Haunting of Hill House was one of the first I picked up.

Actually, I know the reason is because it was one of the few that was in the library, our local the Flushing branch of the public library.

And I picked it up because essentially cuz Stephen King said I should.

And then I read it and I didn't understand more than half of it.

The funny thing is when I think about the book at my different stages, when I read it as a kid, I was probably 15 and all I really remembered, the part that really stayed with me was the haunted house.

Everything's spooky, which as I reread it again, like preparing to come today, I was like looking through it and I was marveling at the fact that we don't even get to the house till page 25 of the book and it's a short book. It's only 175 pages.

But when I was a kid, that was the part that sparked my excitement.

Oh, there's a big spooky house.

And then the other thing that she does that to me is even more rarified within the haunted house field, although certainly anyone who's read The Shining will understand it is that a lot of haunted house stories turn out to be that there's an entity there that is the cause.

Someone died there. Someone a crime was done, blah blah blah. But in her book, it's the house itself.

It's Hill House that is evil.

Or at least that's what Eleanor believes.

The Overlook Hotel feels very much like akin to that.

Yeah.

I believe there's a line early on maybe when Eleanor sees the house for the first time.

Jackson writes, "The house was vile. She shivered and thought the words coming freely into her mind."

Hill House is vile.

It is diseased.

Get away from here at once.

You're absolutely right that there is something to the house being evil.

And the way that Jackson gets at it, as I recall, is not just having Eleanor tell us, but it's also within the architecture of the house is what to me is one of the more memorable things about the book.

If you think about books that came decades later, like House of Leaves, which is about a house that keeps mutating, growing bigger on the inside.

the way that Jackson describes the way rooms just don't seem right.

Walls don't come together at the right angles.

Pieces of the house that you should be able to see from this window are just completely obscured.

It touches on how HP Lovecraft used to write about the way in which angles never came together in the right way.

But she applies that to a house as a living organism almost.

Yeah.

the non uklitian geometry.

That was Lovecraft's whole whole cities built on non uklitian geometry, which I always love cuz I have no idea what that means.

I don't know what it means.

Nobody knows.

Nobody knows what it means, but it sounds good.

And definitely Shirley Jackson, even the first time Eleanor enters her room, she's just standing at like the doorway and she's just trying to understand where the corners are cuz there's strange shadows in places where she thinks there shouldn't be.

and the ceiling goes higher on one end than the other and then she walks across the room and suddenly where she was looks strange and it's so disorienting in a way that feels not cheap like the I feel like the cheap version of this is she walks in and then there was a skeleton in the corner and whatever it might be

please I would never read that book

right it would not become a classic

but for her it's that sense of something is off

something is always off in this place and then of course the beauty of it is you start to understand or you start to wonder is that the house or is that Eleanor?

Because Eleanor is also always trying to figure out why why can't she get close to people?

Why can't she trust anyone?

Why can't she love anyone?

What is what are the things that are off in her?

And how is this house a reflection of that?

And it becomes this wonderful funhouse mirror back and forth between the two.

Talk to me about another moment in your life when you were older when you can remember reading this book and how you received it differently.

So if the first time you read it you're like wow this is a great creepy haunted house story.

Tell me where you were in your life when you read it second third fourth time and what you picked up then.

So the second time I can recall reading it. I was it must have been about 199 I want to say 94 and I had been kicked out of college because I was not doing well. I had poor grades all this kind of rest.

I was living in Ithaca, New York, and I took a job working for Manpower, the temp agency, and I was usually like moving furniture, cleaning offices, whatever it might be, and trying to figure out like was my college career over cuz I got booted out in my junior year, I think.

I was living in Ithaca, New York, and I took a job working for Manpower, the temp agency, and I was usually like moving furniture, cleaning offices, whatever it might be, and trying to figure out like was my college career over cuz I got booted out in my junior year, I think.

And I had a lot of free time, as you sometimes do at temp jobs.

And I'd picked up the book for a class that I characteristically at that time in my life did no work in.

But I had the book in the house that I was sharing in the room that I was sharing with these other guys and I started to read it.

And the thing that stayed with me this time was those first 25 pages where you discover how awful Elanor's life was before she shows up at Hill House.

The awfulness of that was she spent years taking care of a mother who was vile to her and then she lives with her in one of the most effective scenes right at the start but that I totally glossed over at 15.

She's sitting with her sister and brother-in-law and she's saying I'd like to take the family car to drive to Hill House for this trip.

And you watch the sister keeps saying she's Jackson's so nice about this.

Eleanor keeps saying, "The car is half mine.

It was like half my inheritance."

And the sister keeps saying, "I just don't know if I can let you take my car."

And they just keep doing that.

And then the h the brother-in-law just keeps saying, "What if our kid gets sick while we're on while you're away?

We might need to get in the car and drive somewhere."

And you see her being snowed under by the weight of this family and these people who just don't listen to her.

And so then one morning after they've told her no, she just steals the car and you're actually proud of her.

She had done this bold thing.

And I guess in a way like reading it then when I was booted out of school and I had been I'm not going to say anybody's names, but I had been treated really badly by this dean when I got booted out.

Like literally in his office, he said to me, "You will never graduate while I am a dean."

And I had never met this dude before.

And so it really felt like, wow, the universe is out to get me.

And so maybe I was extra empathetic to Eleanor and her feelings of being crushed under the weight of these people.

And so that first 25 page, she steals the car.

And then on her drive to Hill House, it's her first time that she is free.

And you watch her stopping in different places and living out these fantasies about, oh, I could just go here and I could live in the woods and I could grow this kind of fruit and vegetables and I could just live happily.

Or I could go here and the beauty of it is you see her trying out independence.

You see her trying to stand up for herself and then she goes to Hill House

where everything goes fine.

Where it's the shortest novel ever.

She gets there, everyone welcomes her.

It's all sweet.

The house isn't haunted.

Have you ever borrowed anything from this book for your work?

A character name, a beat, a motivation, a tone.

What have you pulled out of it?

Well, actually, I mean, rereading it again just over the weekend, the opening bits, I realized the beginning of Lone Women is Eleanor's escape and the way that she's afraid of being caught.

Like I absolutely lifted that feeling for Adelaide and in a way it's not in the book because in the end my editor and I agreed it was a little boring

but I spent actually a lot more time in an earlier draft.

You stayed with her on the ship that she's first on from Southern California then she's in Seattle.

She spends a little time in Seattle then in then from Seattle she takes the train across Montana.

And that one I spent even more time like really borrowing from that first 25 pages in particular.

When was the last time that you read The Haunting of Hill House?

The last time before this weekend when I was rereading it for this my wife had given birth to our first son.

It was the summer we're both off from teaching.

So we were just basically what we would do is we were up and down by his schedule at that point and living this kind of weird nocturnal life where we would at around 5:00 watch the wire while drinking beer and eating popcorn with this like wheat dust on top of it cuz it was supposedly going to give us more energy or whatever it might do.

watch the wire while drinking beer and eating popcorn with this like wheat dust on top of it cuz it was supposedly going to give us more energy or whatever it might do.

And then eventually he would fall asleep.

My wife who was absolutely much more exhausted would crash.

And one of those times I was in the kitchen.

I started to make it my thing that I would be in the kitchen so that I could be closer to if he woke up I could get to him quicker.

And I started to read some things.

And this was one of the books I actually read Haunting of Hill House then.

So that would have been 11 years ago now cuz he's 11.

And I also read her the book that came after this. We have always lived in the castle

which is as much as I love this book that's her masterpiece I would say.

But it's it the two are almost like a great pairing.

But I read that exhausted in our kitchen in Washington Heights.

And in that one, I just envied the idea that Eleanor lived alone cuz I really needed to live alone at that point when our baby was about a month or two old.

I remember those crazy early morning hours and being up and trying to read something or trying to I think I watched the Baba at like 4:00 in the morning, which is not a great movie if you've just had a kid.

I think I watched the Baba at like 4:00 in the morning, which is not a great movie if you've just had a kid.

That is a No, that's a terrible idea.

Oh my god.

Maybe this was a bad idea.

Yes, that one that's a profound I mean I love that movie, but yeah, I wouldn't recommend it then.

I had not read a plot synopsis beforehand.

It was my mistake.

How do you recommend this book to people if you ever do when you're trying to tell someone you absolutely have to read The Haunting of a Hill House?

How do you sell it?

You know, actually often it's with that opening paragraph that you asked me to read because I really feel like it's almost a kind of key like if a person hears that paragraph and they lean in, they kind of go, "Wait a second.

What does that mean Hill House is not saying?

What does that mean that even Larks and Caddyy did dream?"

If all those things inspire questions, then I know this will be your thing.

Just take it.

I promise you.

And then if I read that to someone and they go, I don't know what they're talking about.

I don't know what that means.

I often say, let me think of something else.

How about

because the other the nice thing is then I might recommend the we have always lived in the castle because that one begins with a much clearer in theory introduction to the main character Maryat.

And she's super weird, but it's more concrete.

But really, I say at heart like do you want to read a beautifully written book about a very lonely woman in a very lonely house?

Well, this is definitely a book that I can see myself reading several more times in my life.

Hopefully, that's the same for you.

Yes.

And hopefully for everyone listening, we've convinced you to give it a shot.

I hope so.

I hope so.

It will reward you.

It's one of the greats.

Yes.

I've been speaking with Victor Laval about Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and about his new novel, Lone Women.

Victor, thank you so much for being here today.

It was a pleasure.

Thanks for this.

Those were my conversations with Joe Hill from 2024 and Victor Laval from 2023.

I'm Gilbert Cruz.

I hope you keep it spooky, everyone.

See you next week.