Ghost stories and haunted houses are my absolute favorites in horror, so I actively seek them out. But due to the quirks of my brain and the busyness of everyday life, I don’t have the focus to read books of standard or more length. I’ve kept to reading comics, novellas, and short stories for the last decade or so. When Tor.com started releasing their novellas in paperback, I bookmarked several of them, and that’s how I found The Atrocities. Gorgeous cover, interesting premise (twisted human-like statues in a maze? YES!), and a manageable page count all cinched it for me.
Plus, I follow Shipp on Twitter and his feed is absolutely a gem: “I don’t know who needs to hear this but a diorama exists depicting your life at this very moment, being viewed by a dozen pale monstrosities in a chthonian cavern,” or “I don’t know who needs to hear this but every time you fall asleep, a giant maggot with human arms pantomimes everything you forgot to do when you were awake.” I feel like more people need to see what he puts out into the world, so that’s why I chose his work for our Book Club.
The Atrocities (2018)
Written by: Jeremy C. Shipp Genre: Gothic Fantasy/Horror Pages: 102 (Paperback)
Publisher: Tor.com
The Premise:
Jeremy Shipp brings you THE ATROCITIES, a haunting gothic fantasy of a young ghost’s education…
When Isabella died, her parents were determined to ensure her education wouldn’t suffer.
But Isabella’s parents had not informed her new governess of Isabella’s… condition, and when Ms. Valdez arrives at the estate, having forced herself through a surreal nightmare maze of twisted human-like statues, she discovers that there is no girl to tutor.
Or is there…?
As this is a book club discussion, there will be spoilers!
Discussion
Readers define horror in different ways. For some, the only qualifier is that it must be scary. For others, what makes horror is the feeling of unease or dread, or meeting with the uncanny…or looking into an abyss that stares back. For me, the horror that comes from The Atrocities lies in the realm of the psychological, and I had a response to it that speaks to a more traditional definition of horror: the feeling of revulsion that follows the experience of something disturbing or unpleasant.
This book bothered me, and I mean that as a compliment. The Atrocities challenged me because I had to wade through some familiar, albeit long-shelved feelings that are most certainly unpleasant and a source of horror for me. And for that to make sense to you, I have to come right out and admit something personal: I was diagnosed with mental illness; one that is chronic and manageable, but incurable. Though it has been many, many years since I’ve been ill to the point of disruption, I can still remember how in its more severe manifestations I experienced symptoms just shades away from psychosis, as well as parasomnia that included the most vivid nightmares and supernatural images my mind could conjure. Thus The Atrocities summoned impressions reminiscent of darker, earlier times in my life where I had difficulty with reality; I struggled with this book because it made me doubt myself and my senses as I read it.
Ghost stories, especially haunted house stories, are concerned with the psyche, and often the ghosts are metaphors for something else going on with the characters: memories haunt them. Experiences, emotions, and ordeals haunt them. Characters are already psychologically compromised when they take their role in the ghost story, so when the symptoms of a haunting appear, we can’t entirely trust what we see through their eyes, as their vision is already clouded by something else: trauma.
I was already psychologically compromised when I cracked open the cover of this book. Its heroine, Ms. Valdez, is likewise compromised, dealing with the aftermath of her son’s death. When someone is already vulnerable to reality, the horror intensifies whenever there is an encounter with something that challenges it.
In my case, The Atrocities challenged my expectations of what a gothic horror story should be.
From the opening pages:
Turn left at the screaming woman with a collapsing face. Turn right at the kneeling man with bleeding sores the size of teacups. If you come across a big-breasted bear with a child’s head in her jaws, you’re going the wrong way (9).
This is a letter of instructions for Ms. Valdez to navigate her way through the hedge maze and its plethora of disturbing statuary to reach the front door of Stockton House. These sculptures, called the Atrocities, depict acts of sin and punishment from the Bible in very vivid and disturbing ways, which hits all the marks on my personal horror aesthetic checklist. And yet the prose, the description of those statues, still threw me for a loop when I read it the first time. These statues are what I expected, but not (and you’re not even explicitly told they are statues right away). The writing is all very straightforward and blunt — no flowery dressing-up of language or purple prose, no deliberation over mood and tone; no easing into anything. It’s fast-paced. Just, BAM! This is what we see; this is what it is. It’s deceptively simple writing that makes it easier for the reader to drop their guard a little bit until the next jolt of reality hits.
Stockton House is topsy-turvy, full of bizarre and grotesque images: freakish statues, gruesome paintings, stained-glass nightmares. Again, this all aligns with my expectations, and yet The Atrocities challenged them time and again, and that feeling of cognitive dissonance created another source of discomfort for me. I came into the book expecting I knew what a haunted mansion looked like, and was met with things that frequently challenged that reality, like the fact that Stockton House has “eighty-four-inch, high definition televisions installed in all the living quarters” (11).
So from the very get-go, as a reader, I’m being disarmed. Again, I was already vulnerable to reality when I started reading. Then Shipp’s stark prose lulled me into thinking it was easy to be aware of what was going on. At the same time, I’m being hit with images and words that chip away at what I think I know a gothic haunted house tale should be. And this is ALL ACCOMPLISHED IN FOUR PAGES. Very, very early on I took a moment to say to myself, “Ok, I thought I knew what I was reading, but I don’t.”
Our window into Stockton House is Ms. Valdez, who is the first-person POV character, and while she’s our anchor in the story, I mentioned above, she’s already compromised by the trauma of the loss of her son. The dreams of her in the hospital are particularly creepy, all the more because the transitions between asleep and awake are abrupt and disconcerting.
Her waking life still seems dreamlike as long as she remains in Stockton House. While Ms. Valdez is working through her bizarre situation — tutoring the dead Isabella, who could be a hallucination triggered by Mrs. Evers’s grief as opposed to being an actual ghost — the creepy environment of the house sets the stage for her own hallucinatory experiences. Through Ms. Valdez, it’s very easy to not be able to tell (or expect) what is happening, let alone tell if it’s real.
I sit at the bench, in the cool shadow of a jacaranda tree. My woven satchel leans against my ankle, but I left all my folders back in the classroom. I kick off my shoes. An electric blue butterfly spirals from above onto my foot and lies flat on my flesh. No. That’s only a petal.
I look up, and a creature with a long hairy face scrambles out of the fountain. The giant guinea pig rushes in my direction, dragging a wet, wilted tutu under its belly. I know I should run, but my body freezes. A little voice whispers that this is the stuffed animal from the hallway come to life (41).
When it comes to language, particularly reading, I have trouble sometimes with picking up on figurative speech. I have a tendency to take what I see or hear as is, which I think is just another quirk of my particular brain. I do get things like metaphor and symbolism, but sometimes things just take a second to click. So for the opening pages mentioning the Atrocities, I’m embarrassed to say, I took that all literally and didn’t realize they were statues at first. The description here of a giant guinea pig — my brain also went literal there. I also accepted at face value the observation that it’s a living version of a stuffed animal, when in real life it turns out to be Bell’s pet capybara…which, oddly enough, felt more absurd once it was revealed to be real. You see, my brain said, THIS IS A HAUNTED HOUSE STORY WITH GHOSTS AND IT’S TOTALLY PLAUSIBLE FOR A DEAD GIRL’S STUFFED ANIMAL TO COME TO LIFE BECAUSE GHOSTS, and yet when I was greeted with the fact that someone would actually cough up the money to buy a live capybara to give to their daughter (complete with wearing a tutu) I was like, pfffffft, PLEASE. Which, of course, is a totally irrational way of looking at it, because in real life, which is the more plausible? Isn’t it amazing what the mind will do in order to cope with affronts to its personal reality? If something doesn’t make sense, the brain will come up with rules or reasons to force things into an alignment it can handle, hence my insistence on making this ghost story a ghost story in the most literal sense possible.
And of course, now that we’ve all read the book, we know that we absolutely are not dealing with that kind of a story. Ghosts as metaphors, check. But literal ghosts? Nope, because the ghost we’ve all been thinking about — Isabella — is actually Mrs. Evers, giggling like a small girl, playing at poltergeist, manifesting her grief in unhealthy ways, “suffering from a shattered psyche” (59). The people in Stockton House are haunted, to be sure, but not by spirits that have “crossed the veil back to the world” (59).
We also learn that Mr. Evers isn’t what he seems, either — not just an eccentric, esoteric artist, but in fact the monster of the story: his sense of reality is equally shattered, as he’s kept Isabella alive and imprisoned in secret. At the confrontation at the end of the book, Mr. Evers pleads with his wife:
You know my heart, Molly. You know I find no greater joy than giving you everything you desire. However, I can’t give you our daughter, because she is beyond our reach. The creatures who stand beside you are not the people you knew. […] They’re abominations […] and their being here in the realm of men is an affront to every rule that binds our reality together. […] They are walking corpses, held together by memories and dreams (100).
In the bizarre, nightmare wonderland that is Stockton House, it turns out, everybody’s a little bit mad. Mr. Evers seems to suffer the worst of it from the weight of multiple realities bearing down on him, if he’s to be believed. From that monologue above, the only observation that seems to ring true is that the characters are “held together by memories and dreams.” For the duration of The Atrocities we experience a whirlwind of visions, dreams, nightmares, hallucinations, and memories; they are the threads that sew the story together, and also generate the main source of fear in The Atrocities. When people see and experience things that are outside of their known reality, the survival mechanism is to ask: “Am I dreaming?” And the true horror comes from the answer: “No, in fact, you are not.”
In Conclusion
Jeremy C. Shipp weaves together a horror tale with an intriguing premise; memorable, disturbing imagery; absurd humor; and stark, clear prose that simultaneously utilizes and uproots the tropes of the genre to demolish reader expectations. Author Paul Cornell described The Atrocities as “a new and very weird dimension to the Gothic, which will stay with you long after it’s over. This is deep, weird, shit.” I wholeheartedly agree with Cornell’s assessment.
When I first finished The Atrocities, there was no question that it was good writing, but I wasn’t sure that I liked it. This was because it had been such a long time since I read horror fiction that made me feel a primal response — a recoiling from unpleasant things. I felt revulsion for the first time in ages because Shipp successfully brings out the horror you feel from the loss of rationality and the inability to discern reality from delusion. When you lose your sense of self and the world around you, it’s very much like being trapped in the labyrinth. But the first sensation you experience when you come out is “I feel alive” (102), and that makes the journey more substantial than before.
I know that given the unique risks Shipp takes with his writing, The Atrocities will not be everybody’s cup of tea. Readers carry their context with them when they pick up a book, and that context shapes their interpretations of a work — so the horror I felt from The Atrocities may be nothing like what any of you have felt. The vulnerability I already possessed when I started reading may not be something you share with me; the framework of our experiences may have completely shaped the story into strange, separate sculptures of their own. I’d like to know if it has.
Please share your experiences with this book. What worked for you and what didn’t? How did this book challenge (or meet, or fail) your expectations? And above all, I’d like to know… How did The Atrocities create horror for you? I look forward to reading your answers in the comments.
Recommended Reading
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959): I read this book after watching Robert Wise’s 1963 film The Haunting in preparation for the 1999 version by Jan de Bont, which I saw in the movie theater in high school (yep, that dates me!). I came back to this book again for a graduate school class, and I’d argue it’s one of the most seminal pieces of modern Gothic fiction where the horror comes from the mind. The very first passage tells us so: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality,” and in the next sentence, Hill House is described as “not sane.” The book chronicles a house that seemingly violates said conditions of reality through its reputation of being haunted; the novel’s heroine, Eleanor, crumbles under the weight of the reality of her life, and through her the reader wanders through the Gothic mansion in a dreamlike state, unable to tell what is real and what isn’t. Memories of the past could be the ghosts wandering the halls, or the spirits of dreams and lives unfulfilled.
Hell House by Richard Matheson (1971): Matheson’s book seems like a nod to Jackson’s aforementioned work in terms of setup: a group of people with varying personalities are assembled in a huge haunted mansion under the premise of a psychological experiment to determine the validity of the supernatural. This was also an assigned reading for graduate school, and while it wasn’t my personal cup of tea, there’s a lot of bizarre and creepy imagery with the house, and the backstory behind the Belasco Mansion is quite interesting (and salacious!). Sexuality and the profaning of the sacred are major sources of psychological horror in this work.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892): I think I was 13 or 14 when I read this, and it was a work I didn’t fully appreciate at the time because a lot of the book’s themes — the subordination of women, the confines of marriage — weren’t on my radar or in my locus of experience. But this book has stayed with me because even now, I can remember the lingering feeling of uneasiness after reading it. The imagery of the wallpaper and the heroine’s psychological unraveling absolutely disturbed me. Growing up I’d find myself staring at wallpaper (sometimes I still do), especially at my Dad’s apartment in NYC, until I could see frightening faces in the twisting scrollwork (I later found out this phenomenon is called pareidolia). Whenever I read passages describing the wallpaper and imagined a woman trapped behind it, I’d think of the weird faces in apartment 2M. And I still can picture the heroine “creeping” in my mind to this day.
Rose Madder by Stephen King (1995): I read this when it came out (and I was in junior high), so a lot of it went over my head at the time; but once again, decades after the fact, images of this book (along with what I felt while reading it) have endured. The novel tells the story of Rose Daniels, who flees the abusive marriage to her violent and vile husband, Norman, who relentlessly pursues her. Then, amid this thriller plot, we’ve also got a portal fantasy that delves into Greek mythology, courtesy of the painting of a woman in a rose madder dress. While there are supernatural elements here — including a journey down the maze of the labyrinth to face the Minotaur — once again, this is a journey of psychological horror and a story that tests sanity (there’s a reason why “madder” is part of the title).
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, illustrated by Camille Rose Garcia (2010): There are countless iterations of this book, which is another portal fantasy that leads to a world where “We’re all mad here.” Some of Wonderland is disturbing (The Queen of Hearts, The Duchess, and Walrus and the Carpenter from Through the Looking-Glass, to name a few) but most of it is bizarre and colorful, and I chose Camille Rose Garcia’s version because I think the aesthetic absolutely nails the colorful absurdity, all the while looking creepy and goth at the same time. It’s like a confectionery nightmare and I love it, and goes perfectly with the vibe of a capybara in a tutu, don’t you think?
Participation Poll
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March’s Book Club Selection: An Illusion of Thieves by Cate Glass, hosted by Kendra Merritt on Friday March 27th!