Five Books That Taught Me How Place Can Haunt

The single thing that separates gothic writing that works from gothic writing that merely decorates is what the author thinks place is for. The amateur thinks place is scenery — a backdrop to be described at the start of the chapter and then forgotten while the people do the plot. The writers who taught me anything treat place as a force: a character with a will, a pressure that shapes everyone inside it, a thing that can do, all by itself, the work a lesser book needs a ghost for. Here are five that taught me the difference, and what each one taught.

1. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

Everyone quotes the first paragraph, and they are right to. Jackson’s genius is that she never once tells you what is in the house, because the house is the thing — a place so wrong in its angles and its silences that it doesn’t need a ghost, it needs only to be entered. What I took from her is the most important lesson of the lot: a place can be the antagonist. You do not have to put a monster in the house. You can make the house the monster, by making it psychologically wrong rather than supernaturally busy, and the reader will supply the dread from their own interior, which is always scarier than anything you could have staged.

2. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

The most famous character in Rebecca is a house, Manderley, and the second most famous is a dead woman who never appears, and the whole book is about how a place can be so saturated with a person that the living cannot compete with it. What du Maurier taught me is that place holds the dead — that a house can keep someone alive, and powerful, and present, long after the body is gone, simply by being the arrangement of rooms and habits and objects that person made. The living narrator loses to Manderley because Manderley remembers Rebecca, and a place that remembers is stronger than a person who is merely there.

3. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

The moor. That is the whole lesson, and it is enormous. Brontë understood that a landscape is not a setting for the emotions of the characters; it is the same thing as the emotions of the characters, the outer weather and the inner weather revealed to be one system. The cruelty and the wildness and the grief are not happening against the moor, they are happening as the moor, and the place and the passion cannot be separated because they were never two things. What I took: stop describing weather to establish mood. Make the weather and the feeling the same fact, so that when the wind comes off the high ground the reader does not think how atmospheric, they think oh no.

4. Alistair MacLeod, the Cape Breton stories

Closer to home, and the one that matters most to me. MacLeod wrote about the Highland Scots of Cape Breton — the land and the sea and the mines and the emigration — and he wrote about them with a gravity that treats place as inheritance, as blood-obligation, as the thing that holds all your dead and will not let you leave it even when leaving it is the only sensible thing to do. His people are haunted not by ghosts but by where they are from, by a land and a way of life that is dying and that they cannot stop loving, and that grief-of-place is, to me, the truest Atlantic subject there is. He taught me that you can write a haunting in which nothing supernatural happens at all — that the past, and the place, and the dead, pressing on a living person through nothing but landscape and memory and duty, is the deepest gothic there is, and the most local.

5. Michael Crummey, Sweetland

And nearest of all — a novel about a man who will not leave a resettling Newfoundland island, who stays after everyone else has gone, alone with the emptied place and its dead. What Crummey understands, and renders better than almost anyone writing now, is that a place is an agreement among people to keep it alive by living in it, and that when the people go the agreement lapses and what remains is not peace but a haunting — the geography holding the shape of a community that has been moved out of it. He taught me the specific modern grief-of-place, the government-emptied outport, the house with no one in it, and he taught me that you can locate the whole gothic in a single stubborn man refusing to sign a form, because the form is the erasure of a place, and a place is never only a place.

Read them together and the lesson repeats, which is how you know it is a real lesson and not a taste: in every one of these books, the place is not where the story happens. The place is the story. Hill House is the fear. Manderley is the dead woman. The moor is the passion. Cape Breton is the inheritance. The island is the loss. Take the location out of any of them and you do not have a book with a weaker setting; you have no book, because the setting was carrying the weight the whole time, doing quietly and without credit the work that amateur writers hire ghosts and monsters to do badly.

So if you want to write a place that haunts, stop describing it. Start using it. Ask what your location wants, what it remembers, what it will not let your people do or become, and then let it do those things to them, on the page, as a force — and you will find, as all five of these writers found, that you need far fewer ghosts than you thought, because a place, rendered as a character, is the most patient and permanent haunting there is. It was here before your people. It will be here after. And it does not, ever, entirely let them go.