Nightmare House

by Douglas Clegg

Douglas Clegg’s Nightmare House sets the scene with spooky foreshadowing, from a long journey through the Hudson Valley to the observations of odd villagers with wide-set eyes, reminiscent of Nell’s lunchtime dialog with her waitress in Shirley Jackson’s Hill House.

Clegg creates suspense from the first chapter, as Ethan encounters scary objects and situations upon his arrival at Harrow. First, he stumbles into an unruly garden in the dark and mistakes an angel statue for a living person. Next, feral cats appear as crawling shadows that seem darkly supernatural. Then Maggie appears, giving Ethan the impression that she’s another statue or even a fairy. Finally, he’s afraid to look up at the tower window, only to find out the window has been bricked up. None of these events are supernatural or even dangerous, but Ethan is uneasy, and so are we.

Nightmare House uses an early 20th-century tone of voice that doesn’t always ring true because of its inconsistency (would anyone have referred to a child as “the kid” in 1926?) It is sometimes overwrought: “...she blocked it with her form, bedecked in a long dark dress of somber demeanor.”

The time jump to the year 2000 does not add much to the novel, other than cast doubt on Ethan’s entire story as his older self encourages us to doubt its veracity. Did Pocket and Maggie die due to Matilde’s haunting, or did Ethan kill them in cold blood? Did Clegg even need to put this question to readers, given that Nightmare House is a haunted house novel? This isn’t Gone Girl, after all.

Muddying the waters in the epilogue infused the conclusion of the book with a lack of clarity, and clarity was already a problem:

An entire labyrinth of rooms existing on the other side of mirrors within the house. As she grew into a young woman, she watched from her mirror windows as the world went by. She watched others live their lives while she remained among the ancient walls and altars of the dead. (Clegg ch. 11)

In the Arthurian legend from which this image is derived, the Lady of Shallot must view the world only by gazing at its reflection in her mirror. If she glances out the window, she will be cursed. But in Clegg’s passage, the mirrors are themselves windows. How is Matilde able to watch through a mirror? A mirror, by definition, reflects what is in front of it, not what is on the other side. It is plausible that a mirror could have supernatural attributes that transform it into a window, but this needs to be more fully explained if that is the case. Likewise, Matilde’s rooms might be actual rooms in the physical house, or they could be set in a ghostly realm. Clegg leaves this up to readers to decipher, but the book would benefit from more specificity.

Clegg’s writing contains frequent paragraph breaks. In my thesis novel, I struggle with where to insert breaks. After reading Nightmare House I have come to realize that too many breaks can be annoying:

…the creatures of shadow that she had brought into her abode as playmates for her incarceration.       

                       That was all she wanted.

                       More spirits.

More souls to feed her furnace.

                       I felt her mind within my own… (Clegg ch. 11)

These breaks provide pointed emphasis when used one or two times in a novel. But Clegg uses this style repeatedly, and it gives the prose a sing-song quality.

Another scene with a mirror raises questions and could have been better conceived:

I saw a mirror that looked out, like a window, onto the bedroom that was once both my nursery, and Matilde’s.

The mirror was just large enough for me to squeeze through; I broke it with my
fists, and crawled into the room that I had once slept in as a child. (Clegg ch. 11)

If a mirror “looks out, like a window,” it is a window. If Ethan breaks it and crawls through to another side, it’s a window. A mirror would reflect Ethan and what is behind him. How did he crawl through the mirror? Was there a hole in the wall behind it?

Nightmare House contains many gems. The garden scene near the beginning is evocative and so vivid that I could feel the darkness and smell the soil and shallots. Pocket is a colorful and poignant character and perhaps the most well-drawn in the book. In a bittersweet moment, he asserts that names define people’s interior qualities and that his name is an example of his nature—he hides things in his pockets, indicating that he is secretive.

Nightmare House is a novel of strong concepts and expressive content that would have benefitted from greater clarity and focus.