JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 249 из 359There is nothing wrong with these things taken one by one; it is just that when we add up the perceptual equivalent of their angles, we come out with a triangle where the sum of the corners equals a bit more (or a bit less) than 180º.
As Anne Rivers Siddons points out, everything in Hill House is skewed. There is nothing which is perfectly straight or perfectly level-which may be why doors keep swinging open or shut. And this idea of skew is important to Jackson's concept of the Bad Place because it heightens those feelings of altered perception. Being in Hill House is like tripping on a low-watt dosage of LSD, where everything seems strange and you feel you will begin to hallucinate at any time. But you never quite do. You just look incredulously at a stained-glass window . . . or a decorative urn . . . or the pattern on the carpet. Being in Hill House is like looking into one of those trick rooms where folks look big at one end and small at the other. Being in Hill House is like lying in bed in the dark on the night you went three drinks beyond your capacity . . . and feeling the bed begin to spin slowly around and around . . . . Jackson suggests (always in her low, insinuating voice-this, along with The Turn of the Screw , may very well be where Peter Straub got the idea that the horror story works best when it is "ambiguous and low-key and restrained") these things quietly and rationally; she is never strident. It is just, she says, that being in Hill House does something fundamental and unpleasant to the screen of perception. This is what, she suggests, being in telepathic contact with a lunatic would be like.
Hill House is evil; we'll accept Montague's postulate. But how responsible is Hill House for the phenomena which follow? There are knockings in the night-huge thunderings, rather, which terrify both Theo and Eleanor. Luke and Professor Montague attempt to track down a barking dog and get lost within a stone's throw of the house-shades of Canavan the bookdealer (Brennan's story predates The Haunting of Hill House ) and Charles Grant's strange little town of Oxrun, Connecticut. Theo's clothes are splattered with some foul red substance ("red paint," Eleanor says . . . but her terror suggests a more sinister substance) that later disappears. And written in the same red substance, first in the hall and then over the wardrobe where the ruined clothes have been hung are these words: COME HOME, ELEANOR . . . HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR.
Here, in this writing, is where the lives of Eleanor and of this evil house, this Bad Place, become inextricably entwined. The house has singled her out.
As Anne Rivers Siddons points out, everything in Hill House is skewed. There is nothing which is perfectly straight or perfectly level-which may be why doors keep swinging open or shut. And this idea of skew is important to Jackson's concept of the Bad Place because it heightens those feelings of altered perception. Being in Hill House is like tripping on a low-watt dosage of LSD, where everything seems strange and you feel you will begin to hallucinate at any time. But you never quite do. You just look incredulously at a stained-glass window . . . or a decorative urn . . . or the pattern on the carpet. Being in Hill House is like looking into one of those trick rooms where folks look big at one end and small at the other. Being in Hill House is like lying in bed in the dark on the night you went three drinks beyond your capacity . . . and feeling the bed begin to spin slowly around and around . . . . Jackson suggests (always in her low, insinuating voice-this, along with The Turn of the Screw , may very well be where Peter Straub got the idea that the horror story works best when it is "ambiguous and low-key and restrained") these things quietly and rationally; she is never strident. It is just, she says, that being in Hill House does something fundamental and unpleasant to the screen of perception. This is what, she suggests, being in telepathic contact with a lunatic would be like.
Hill House is evil; we'll accept Montague's postulate. But how responsible is Hill House for the phenomena which follow? There are knockings in the night-huge thunderings, rather, which terrify both Theo and Eleanor. Luke and Professor Montague attempt to track down a barking dog and get lost within a stone's throw of the house-shades of Canavan the bookdealer (Brennan's story predates The Haunting of Hill House ) and Charles Grant's strange little town of Oxrun, Connecticut. Theo's clothes are splattered with some foul red substance ("red paint," Eleanor says . . . but her terror suggests a more sinister substance) that later disappears. And written in the same red substance, first in the hall and then over the wardrobe where the ruined clothes have been hung are these words: COME HOME, ELEANOR . . . HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR.
Here, in this writing, is where the lives of Eleanor and of this evil house, this Bad Place, become inextricably entwined. The house has singled her out.