Suggested Reading
Architecture and dialog
Worth a read. And it’s short.
At the risk of luring you into the trap of Architecture and Dialog—a story wherein people wander lavish settings and talk a lot in search of verbs, a story with no thru-line escalating physical action/dynamic (i.e. anything Jane Austen)—here’s a decent think piece about Victorian architecture and horror stories.
Anyone interested in horror, Click here.
In Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil the public housing scheme of Savannah is slammed because the new housing was built in a Neo-Victorian style. So shoddily built that the carpenter gothic gingerbread decayed very quickly. Within a year of construction the newer housing was identical to the slums it had replaced.
In just about everything else—The Shining and Salem’s Lot and Burnt Offerings and Rosemary’s Baby and The Haunting of Hill House—we trudge through period revival houses. Then, blam, in The House Next Door and Poltergeist we finally move forward into aggressively modern houses.
It never fails, how the dreams of one generation become the nightmares of the next.
They don’t haunt them like they used to. Modern architecture has all the charm of a dropped plate of lasagna.
This is fascinating, and it's perfect timing for me, as I'm currently working on a haunted house story (set in a quirky but decidedly not Victorian house, for the record).
While we're on the subject, I would love some suggestions of what you and others consider to be the essential haunted house stories. (Beyond the ones you already listed in this post, of course.) House of Leaves, obviously, and more recently, How to Sell a Haunted House and Horrorstor. What other must-reads am I missing?