The Literary Haunted House: Lovecraft, Matheson, King, and the Horror in BetweenRebeccaJanicker. McFarland, 2015.

Abstract

Literary Haunted House: Lovecraft, Matheson, King, and the Horror in Between Rebecca Janicker. McFarland, 2015.To discuss the role of what she calls the house motif in facilitating the creation of liminal spaces where past and present directly interact, Rebecca Janicker employs a series of case studies featuring works from three of America's most wellknown horror writers. An extended introduction situates these texts in the gothic genre, before outlining theoretical foundations for concepts of space and liminality around which Janicker's arguments circulate. Each chapter has a given story as its chief focus, beginning with H. P. Lovecraft's The Dreams in the Witch House (1933), followed by Richard Matheson's A Stir of Echoes (1958) and Earthbound (1982/1989), then finishing with a run through Stephen King's Shining (1977), Christine (1983), and Bag of Bones (1998).Accompanied at times by references to each other or additional stories from each respective author, these case studies are viewed in relation to themes from within their contemporary historical settings: the impact of science, urbanization, immigration, and modernity for Lovecraft; suburbanization and nostalgia for Matheson; and class, family, nostalgia, and race for King. A brief conclusion closes the study by gesturing toward the potential applicability of Janicker's work across print and other media.The book's broad scope and tendency to wander across varied historical contexts and concerns make it difficult to place within any specific set of academic literature. While Janicker is aware of some newer research and includes a brief list in her conclusion (168), these sources are not integrated within the study itself which largely uses older material. This has the effect of placing the parallel to recent studies of the chosen authors, haunting in fiction and the gothic/horror genres more broadly. A striking omission from the bibliography is Andrew Smith's Ghost Story, 1840-1920: A Cultural History (2010). Despite dealing primarily with older texts, Smith nevertheless engages with concepts of history and haunted houses in his chapter about Henry James. Smith's skillful discussion of the interplay between history and haunting could have been used to great effect by Janicker.In the preface we are told that the book began as a PhD project (ix). Based on its stylistic attributes, little was done in the conversion from thesis to monograph. …