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Solving a haunted house with librarianship
Nov. 1st, 2024 09:21 amManaged to sneak in a quick spooky season read, which I had picked up at Readercon over the summer: Sarah Monette’s A Theory of Haunting, a novella about the whimsically named murder house Thirdhop Scarp.
Our reluctant protagonist is one Kyle Murchison Booth, a shy archivist at an institution called the Parrington Museum, which appears to be somewhere in New York State. Kyle does not like small talk, or Spiritualism, or really much of anyone or anything, although more in a chronically anxious way than a mean one. Kyle really does not like the assignment he gets at the beginning of the story: the Parrington heir who funds the museum, who is basically normal if a bit bitchy, wants him to extract her extremely gullible sister from the circles of the guy who just bought Thirdhop Scarp, a slick and fraudulent occultist named, supposedly, Marcus Oleander.
To this end, Marcus Oleander has been somehow induced to hire Kyle to catalogue the four different messy occult collections Oleander has acquired and dumped in the library at the house. Kyle certainly finds enough proof of fraudulence to convince any reasonable person that Oleander is a fraud, but there’s really no such thing as enough proof of fraudulence to render the infinitely credulous Grisela Parrington skeptical about anyone or anything, so instead Kyle is stuck there weekend after weekend unwillingly uncovering the mysterious history of the house and getting dragged into seances and witnessing the power playing within Oleander’s pompously named occult society, and all sorts of other nonsense he’d rather not be doing. With the help of the adolescent medium Alexis, and despite the interference of Alexis’ guardians and various other unsavory characters that constitute Oleander’s posse, Kyle has to identify and then disarm whatever in the house keeps killing people before it, well, kills all of them.
This may not have been the most original work ever written–which is hard to do with haunted house stories; Shirley Jackson kind of solved the genre forever, in my opinion–but it was certainly entertaining and spooked me a bit at the end. My only critique is something about it feels more like Americans trying to write English stories than it does like an actual American story, despite the very classic American haunted house story features, like an “old” house that has only had three owners and was built barely 80 years ago. Some of this might be the vaguely steampunk quality to some of the names, like “Griselda Parrington,” and some of it might be that I was thrown off by how often the main character says “Er,” which I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone with a New York or in fact any kind of American accent say. We say “Uh” because if you said “Er” with an American accent that would imply that you were making an R sound, which nobody does; the English just spell “Uh” as “Er” because that’s how they’d pronounce “Er.” But regardless of what country it takes place in, it’s a nice 130 pages of atmospheric family secrets and occult happenings and sudden deaths and general mystery for tweedy nerds. I enjoyed it a lot and might check out the other short stories featuring Kyle Murchison Booth, who I gather is a recurring Sarah Monette character.
Our reluctant protagonist is one Kyle Murchison Booth, a shy archivist at an institution called the Parrington Museum, which appears to be somewhere in New York State. Kyle does not like small talk, or Spiritualism, or really much of anyone or anything, although more in a chronically anxious way than a mean one. Kyle really does not like the assignment he gets at the beginning of the story: the Parrington heir who funds the museum, who is basically normal if a bit bitchy, wants him to extract her extremely gullible sister from the circles of the guy who just bought Thirdhop Scarp, a slick and fraudulent occultist named, supposedly, Marcus Oleander.
To this end, Marcus Oleander has been somehow induced to hire Kyle to catalogue the four different messy occult collections Oleander has acquired and dumped in the library at the house. Kyle certainly finds enough proof of fraudulence to convince any reasonable person that Oleander is a fraud, but there’s really no such thing as enough proof of fraudulence to render the infinitely credulous Grisela Parrington skeptical about anyone or anything, so instead Kyle is stuck there weekend after weekend unwillingly uncovering the mysterious history of the house and getting dragged into seances and witnessing the power playing within Oleander’s pompously named occult society, and all sorts of other nonsense he’d rather not be doing. With the help of the adolescent medium Alexis, and despite the interference of Alexis’ guardians and various other unsavory characters that constitute Oleander’s posse, Kyle has to identify and then disarm whatever in the house keeps killing people before it, well, kills all of them.
This may not have been the most original work ever written–which is hard to do with haunted house stories; Shirley Jackson kind of solved the genre forever, in my opinion–but it was certainly entertaining and spooked me a bit at the end. My only critique is something about it feels more like Americans trying to write English stories than it does like an actual American story, despite the very classic American haunted house story features, like an “old” house that has only had three owners and was built barely 80 years ago. Some of this might be the vaguely steampunk quality to some of the names, like “Griselda Parrington,” and some of it might be that I was thrown off by how often the main character says “Er,” which I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone with a New York or in fact any kind of American accent say. We say “Uh” because if you said “Er” with an American accent that would imply that you were making an R sound, which nobody does; the English just spell “Uh” as “Er” because that’s how they’d pronounce “Er.” But regardless of what country it takes place in, it’s a nice 130 pages of atmospheric family secrets and occult happenings and sudden deaths and general mystery for tweedy nerds. I enjoyed it a lot and might check out the other short stories featuring Kyle Murchison Booth, who I gather is a recurring Sarah Monette character.