Haunted House Novels, Stephen King Flowchart, the Default Haunted House

A Spine-Tingling Reading List of Haunted House Novels
- Claire Fuller, Electric Lit

The Stephen King Universe Flowchart
- Tessiegirl, Art+Charts+Life

How Victorian Mansions Became the Default Haunted House
- Erin Blakemore, Jstor Daily

Starcrossed

Fans of Ravenloft have long used the setting a springboard for creating content more original and interesting than the official products. One of the best kept secrets in the "Ravenloft underground" is Eleanor Ferron's Starcrossed webcomic, which is definitely worth revisiting (or taking a look at for the first time) this Halloween season.

Bloody Tears

The second season of Netflix's Castlevania cartoon is out, just in time for Halloween. Even though the second season is longer than the first season's truncated run-time, its eight episodes are a quick watch. I tried to pace myself, but watched in all within a twenty-four hour span. 

Feels good, man. 

Here's the trailer, if you haven't seen it. 

Anyway, also worth checking out is this rendition of "Bloody Tears":

Goat Worship, Cheddar Goblin, Signs as Women in Horror

A Condensed History of Goat Worship Through the Ages
- Scab Casserole, Invisible Oranges

An Oral History of Cheddar Goblin, the Mac & Cheese-Loving Mascot in 'Mandy'
- Jennifer Vineyard, Thrillist

The signs as women in horror
- Katie Skelly, Medium

Cinderheim on Land Between Two Rivers

So here's a cool thing that happened: Jim Davis, DM of the Land Between Two Rivers used material from my Cinderheim setting in his streamed campaign! Needless to say, I find that super flattering and I got a real kick out of seeing Hamada the Reaver and Niu Bo Wei in someone else's game. 

My stuff shows up at about the 36 minute mark and I get a nice shout-out at 2:31 in the Youtube video embedded above.

Of course, if you'd like to get up to similar shenanigans with Cinderheim, it's currently available here in both pdf and print.

The Haunting of Hill House

I love horror, but the genre often makes me feel like a contrarian; the things that get held up as good examples of the form frequently fail to excite me. I want to like these things as much as everyone else, but in many cases I just don't see what everyone else is seeing. 

Maybe I expect more, maybe I expect something different.

Case in point: after reading the reviews and surveying the general sentiment, it feels like I'm the only one who didn't enjoy Netflix's adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. 

I wanted to like it. I was excited when I heard it was in production. I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt even after seeing all the red flags in the trailer. Unfortunately, The Haunting of Hill House failed to hit the mark for me on all the important targets:

Adaptation. There's really no reason for this series to be tied to Shirley Jackson's novel, aside from banking on name recognition. The series suffers by comparison to Jackson's masterpiece. The elements shared between the series and the novel are neutered and listless in the former. For example, consider the fate of the "cup of stars." In Jackson's novel, the cup of stars is a powerfully written and subtle symbol found early in the book whose significance only grows in the context of the events that follow; in the show, the cup of stars is reduced to an Easter egg--a knowing nod to the audience, a name-check, a moment of cynical branding that possesses none of the original's punch.

Aesthetic. The Haunting of Hill House would have been more effective is it wasn't filmed in a style similar to that of A Series of Unfortunate Events. The house never really feels threatening or even old; it doesn't have a presence on the screen. The mold-like infection meant to symbolically relay the corruption at the heart of the story is rendered sterile and antiseptic. The supernatural moments look unreal, but not in the sense of invoking dream-like, phantasmagorical atmosphere; it's hard to suspend disbelief that the setting wasn't largely created in post-production. The make-up effects are particularly clownish; you know who the ghosts are because they have bluish or greenish faces that would be right at home in a Goosebumps adaptation.

Tone and theme. Horror as a way of exploring familial trauma is nothing new, but it can work exquisitely well. It doesn't work well in The Haunting of Hill House because the soap opera far outweighs any interesting insights into family dynamics, generational discord, or interpersonal connection. What we get instead is...well, the captioned dialog to the left speaks for itself. What's worse is that some of the family drama rings patently false; the drug addiction subplot, for example, references the relatively sanitized and banal tv version of drug addiction rather than the far more potent horrors of substance abuse in the real world. Ditto the mental health subplots.

Seriously: how tired is this imagery?

Unheimlich. Horror lives and dies on its ability to make us feel the power of the abject and uncanny. In its defense, The Haunting of Hill does have a  few moments of unsettling imagery, but these are few and far between. Instead, we get jump scares--the nadir of the genre--and many iterations of the tired image of a face, the eyes gone pupil-less, the mouth stretched wide to emit the same kind of shriek we use to signal hungry velociraptors and spectral incursions alike. 

Storytelling. Look, if you are surprised at the resolution of the bent-neck lady, you need to get out more and yet also find the time to read more. The plot is a study in obviousness and the ending is as unsatisfying as a Hang in There motivational poster.

Fear Street

Bad Books for Bad People
Episode 26: Fear Street

Jack and Kate celebrate the Halloween season with a visit to R.L. Stine's fictional town of Shadyside, a suburban hamlet with more than its fair share or spooky teen-centric violence. For their first venture onto Fear Street, your hosts read and dissect The Wrong Number and The Halloween Party. Surprisingly, the books contain many of the perennial BBfBP favorite themes along with some insight into the psychology and behavior of 90s teens.

Are these books a gateway drug to convert teens into weird fiction fans? Is Zima a very mature beverage? What do Elvira, Psychomania, and Drake in a wheelchair have to do with all of this? Find out the answers to all these questions and more in this month's episode of Bad Books for Bad People.

BBfBP theme song by True Creature 

Find us at BadBooksBadPeople.com, on Twitter @badbooksbadppl, Instagram @badbooksbadpeople and on Facebook. You can discover where to get all the books featured on Bad Books for Bad People on our About Page.

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