JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 243 из 359as she was reading a book about a group of nineteenth-century psychic researchers who rented a haunted house in order to study it and record their impressions of what they had seen and heard for the purpose of presenting a treatise to the Society for Psychic Research. As she recalls: 'They thought they were being terribly scientific and proving all kinds of things, and yet the story that kept coming through their dry reports was not at all the story of a haunted house, it was the story of several earnest, I believe misguided, certainly determined people, with their differing motivations and backgrounds.' The story so excited her that she could hardly wait to create her own haunted house and her own people to study it.
"Shortly thereafter, she states, on a trip to New York, she saw at the 125th Street station, a grotesque house-one so evil-looking, one that made such a somber impression, that she had nightmares about it long afterward. In response to her curiosity, a New York friend investigated and found that the house, intact from the front, was merely a shell since a fire had gutted the structure . . . . In the meantime, she was searching newspapers, magazines, and books for pictures of suitably hauntedlooking houses; and at last she discovered a magazine picture of a house that seemed just right. It looked very much like the hideous building she had seen in New York: `. . . it had the same air of disease and decay, and if ever a house looked like a candidate for a ghost, it was this one.' The picture identified the house as being in a California town; consequently, hoping her mother in California might be able to acquire some information about the house, she wrote asking for help. As it happened, her mother was not only familiar with the house but provided the startling information that Miss Jackson's great-grandfather had built it." *
Heh-heh-heh, as the Old Witch used to say.
On its simplest level, Hill House follows the plan of those Psychic Society investigators of whom Miss Jackson had read: it is a tale of four ghost-busters who gather in a house of ill repute. It recounts their adventures there, and culminates with a scary, mystifying climax. The ghost-busters-Eleanor, Theo, and Luke-have come together under the auspices of one Dr.
Montague, an anthropologist whose hobby is investigating psychic phenomena. Luke, a young wise-guy type of fellow (memorably played by Russ Tamblyn in Robert Wise's sensitive film version of the book), is there as a representative of the owner, his aunt; he regards the whole thing as a lark . . . at least at first.
Eleanor and Theo have been invited for different reasons.
"Shortly thereafter, she states, on a trip to New York, she saw at the 125th Street station, a grotesque house-one so evil-looking, one that made such a somber impression, that she had nightmares about it long afterward. In response to her curiosity, a New York friend investigated and found that the house, intact from the front, was merely a shell since a fire had gutted the structure . . . . In the meantime, she was searching newspapers, magazines, and books for pictures of suitably hauntedlooking houses; and at last she discovered a magazine picture of a house that seemed just right. It looked very much like the hideous building she had seen in New York: `. . . it had the same air of disease and decay, and if ever a house looked like a candidate for a ghost, it was this one.' The picture identified the house as being in a California town; consequently, hoping her mother in California might be able to acquire some information about the house, she wrote asking for help. As it happened, her mother was not only familiar with the house but provided the startling information that Miss Jackson's great-grandfather had built it." *
Heh-heh-heh, as the Old Witch used to say.
On its simplest level, Hill House follows the plan of those Psychic Society investigators of whom Miss Jackson had read: it is a tale of four ghost-busters who gather in a house of ill repute. It recounts their adventures there, and culminates with a scary, mystifying climax. The ghost-busters-Eleanor, Theo, and Luke-have come together under the auspices of one Dr.
Montague, an anthropologist whose hobby is investigating psychic phenomena. Luke, a young wise-guy type of fellow (memorably played by Russ Tamblyn in Robert Wise's sensitive film version of the book), is there as a representative of the owner, his aunt; he regards the whole thing as a lark . . . at least at first.
Eleanor and Theo have been invited for different reasons.