Greg S > Recent Status Updates

…weren’t they supposed to be taking notes or something? Now that I think about it…do they even have paper? A pencil?

Eleanor freaks out even though other women have been named Eleanor.

Some dichotomous thinking from the doctor/professor/scientist or whatever he’s supposed to be.

Some of these are so out of character and melodramatic, but maybe it’s to give me the impression that they’re going insane, or something. — “She is wicked, Eleanor thought, beastly and soiled and dirty.”

You know, this book was reminding me of a Vincent Price film I saw on TV in the 90s. I looked it up and the movie is called House on Haunted Hill. It’s almost exactly like this. I think to myself that the movie MUST be based on this book, obviously. I find that the movie was made the exact same year that this book was published. The movie was released eight months before the book was published. How bizarre!

I always find it funny the little quirk writers have to make unlikely characters, like the shallow socialite, and the rough grifter, all familiar with some short story.

I know Theodora is alluding to Little Nell from Dickens, but I never read that one. For readers at the time, her death was sensational in its melodrama.

Or…leave? — “We must take precautions,’ he said”

“…Eleanor heard it all up and down her back…”

“it’s not the work hands were made for, she told herself.”

We use as if and as though to make comparisons. They have a similar meaning. We use as if and as though to talk about an imaginary situation or a situation that may not be true but that is likely or possible. As if is more common than as though. In informal English, ‘like’ can be used in a similar way to as if, though it is not always considered correct in formal contexts - Cambridge Dictionary.

The banging like the Tell-Tale Heart. What’s the old word for it? Flights of fancy?

In Poe’s House of Usher, it was the peculiarity of the people and their maladies (and not the house) where here we have a bit of both. Poe’s long sentences lulled you into a sense of rhythm where here ideas are cut off sharply or pivot quickly with a barb or an irrelevant digression, or a quick ironic retort.

It reminds me of House of Usher except it suffers from being too long and insistent, and also from not being in the first person. There’s a reason Dracula is epistolary.

Yes, exactly. — “I wonder who slept in the nursery,’ the doctor said irrelevantly.”

100 pages to say it’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Scandalous. — “She eventually took a girl from the village to live with her, as a kind of companion…”

Doctor Montague summarizes the last chapter in mocking sarcasm.

Section II and chapter 4 and we’re still only talking about the house or imagining fantasies of it or comparing it to literary fiction like a literary critic.

What does that mean exactly? — “…and looked trustingly at one another.”

1959 sarcasm. “Did you have a lot of uncles?’
‘Thousands. Do you?’”

Hmm. Some post-modernism.

Eyeroll at sexism. — “…at the back of her mind the thoroughly female conviction that the best way to soothe a troubled mind is to put on comfortable shoes.”

What is this, Lovecraft? — “what nightmares are waiting, shadowed, in those high corners…”

Interesting choice giving Eleanor a submissive terrorist stricken state of mind. A haunted house would probably not be my first choice if I was a newly liberated person.

“Besides, he would laugh at me if I tried to…”

“atavistic”?

If you say so! — “…not a fit place for people or for love or for hope.”

If you say so. — “…more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake…”

Now I’m reminded of Marion Crane’s long long drive in Hitchcock’s Psycho.