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.