Transcript
Speaker: Hello, Book Club listeners. This is your Blanket Spoiler Warning. We'll be spoiling the book The House on Abigail Lane along with any of the other books we have discussed on this podcast. Houses are empty shells of wood and brick and plaster, devoid of souls or intent. It's us, the creatures that are installed within them, that ultimately define their character.
Speaker: Welcome to the Book Club Podcast. Today, we are discussing The House on Abigail Lane by Keelan Patrick Burke. I'm Carly, and I wanted to read this book because it was the top -rated indie -published haunted house book on Goodreads. I'm Caroline, and I'm excited that we read this book because it had a very different format that I think referenced crowdsourced horror, and that's how a lot of us actually experience horror stories these days.
Speaker: This book is tough to summarize. It is written in the style of an investigative account and tells many stories about the different characters who encountered the house on Abigail Lane, whether as residents or as investigators. Throughout there are many references to articles, books, and documentaries about the house. It also repeatedly mentioned that some of the people who experience odd things at or due to the house on Abigail Lane
Speaker: are seeking fame. The first story from 1956 is about one of the men building the house. He disappears leaving behind only a glass eye. Others disappear, each one leaving some item behind like a tooth, an audio recorder, or a wedding ring.
Speaker: The people who are able to talk about what they experienced described a strong but different smell. One person smells motor oil, another person smells chlorine. They see different things like an otherworldly beach where people speak backwards or a lighthouse on a cliff. In the 70s a Vietnam vet moves into the house. He's been diagnosed with PTSD and sees disturbing apparitions in the house, including a 10 -foot clown. In 1975, Sandy, a real estate agent,
Speaker: feels called to the house. She's searching for proof of something beyond this light. She compares her experience with the moon landing, an event that was incomprehensible a few years before, but is now reality. After her disappearance, the house begins receiving attention, particularly after Amityville Horror became a hit. Then there are a few instances in the 1980s, but the house is mostly quiet during the 1990s.
Speaker: Sandy, the real estate agent, reappears in 2008 to a group gathered in front of the house to learn about its history from a blogger, Arthur Windale. Her eyes are unworldly blue and she has tattoos all over her bald head. She smiles beatifically and gives Windale a seashell composed of materials not found on Earth. She walks out of the house into the crowd and disappears.
Speaker: Windale, the blogger, later disappears in the house, leaving a recording behind. In the recording he says that he smells smoke and describes a huge wall of black obsidian.
Speaker: And then there are sounds of something huge walking around and then a loud fluttering. A researcher named Morehead experienced something in the house and after that was blind in one eye, although he said he could see other worlds through that eye for the rest of his life. He later killed himself gouging out both his eyes, leaving a written message, all hail the sunflower god.
Speaker: In 2018, a documentary filmmaker, Mike Howard, sets up cameras in the house. Howard searched the r slash don't look subreddit for new material and found out about the house. His cameras captured an opening in the house like a screen showing scenes that previous visitors had described. Howard walks through it and vanishes.
Speaker: Before he leaves, he says, I think it's a door into someone else's dreams. The video is posted online and a speculative fiction writer, Scott Walker, saw it when his teenage daughter showed him. Walker recognizes the scene from the video as his dreams, according to his notes, which say that people walked into his dreams and got lost. He was born in 1971, but the first disappearances, which are related to his dreams, happened back in 1956.
Speaker: Walker visits the house to see if he can come to the bottom of this puzzle. He doesn't notice anything usual until he returns home to find his wife and his daughter are changed. They don't have eyes anymore. He says that they got lost in his dreams. A later note says the sunflower god has replaced the world and will give him the answers he seeks. The book closes noting that the house has been devolished to build a mall, which will open in 2026.
Speaker: So my opening question is about how the narrator connects each event in the House's history to current events in United States at the time.
Speaker: In other haunted house stories, we find connections between the haunting and the mental state of the people inside the house. In this story, is the house connected to the mental state of the country? Yes, I think there are some indications of that. Although I also want to note that the author, who we never know, he seems to be someone who's just collecting all those stories.
Speaker: I don't think he strongly sets forward opinions of his own. He kind of, in my mind, mentions every possibility under the sun for a lot of things. But there is definitely a thread here of connecting this house to events in United States history. For example, he notes that there were several occurrences during the Vietnam War, a time of turmoil and trauma.
Speaker: I think there's also something tied to Nixon's investigation and resignation. At some point he mentions that the first man to disappear in the house was a black man and it did not occasion much notice. Unfortunately in 1956 the disappearance of a black man just did not come to the radar of
Speaker: the police and the white citizenry around here, around there, which certainly reflects something that was true in America at that time. Because the next disappearance is a young boy in the nuclear family, a family of a husband, a wife, a son and a daughter. And the son disappears and he's like the epitome of the American child. And so that gets a lot more public notice.
Speaker: Yes. And then there's a couple of things in the eighties, I think is in the late seventies or early eighties, there's supposedly some connection between an occurrence at the house where all the cats and dogs in the neighborhood come and sit in the house and stare at it. And supposedly that happens on the same day that the church of Satan was founded in LA, something like that. So supposedly connections there. And then he says the nineties were a time of quiet. Mm -hmm.
Speaker: You know, because we all know everything was great in the nineties. Right. Yeah. And the house is in suburban Ohio, so it's Midwest America. Right. Feels like the heart of the United States. Yeah, I think that's maybe why it's chosen. And then post 9 -11, you know, weird things start happening again. I think the next dates are 2001, 2002, 2008.
Speaker: 2012, 2014, so history is moving again and so is the house, I guess. This style of writing, we don't get to connect with characters or there's not a long or layered character development. I think I really like Sandy the Realtor, but I wonder if that's just because she disappears and then comes back and it's like, oh, there's a character that developed maybe, you know, I can guess about.
Speaker: you know, she comes back and she feels like a higher being of some sort because she's because of her appearance and the way she smiles. And it feels like she has changed. And that's like one character I can hang on to who's like had a long term experience in the story.
Speaker: But I did enjoy reading it. It's kind of hard to find a thread and hang on to it. It feels like there's a lot that are potential conclusions we can draw from these stories and how the stories of these individual characters connect together or how they connect to the United States history. I don't feel comfortable making
Speaker: definitive conclusions about that. It's just information to take in and sort of experience. Yeah. I mean, this style is to provide everything anyone has ever thought or said or seen about the house. It very much reads like a true crime summary or something you would
Speaker: read on Reddit. Here's the history of this haunted location. Right. That's really, really interesting. Because yeah, it is an experience of reading social media that there's not a structure that of a traditional novel. It's it is like reading things that are contributed by many different writers and pieces of information. Yeah. I mean, we each found things we liked in that.
Speaker: I also thought the idea that it reflected the United States was interesting, but really that was just one sort of tossed off suggestion for what's going on here. There were many others. Yeah. So the people experience different things. It's kind of cool how different the different experiences are. Like the first family, first of all, the young boy has some, I would call it antisocial behavior. He's just not
Speaker: not to pathologize him, but like he's just not an outgoing and happy child. He's more quiet and he disappears. And then his father kind of loses his mind and says the house, aid him, and then the father disappears. And then, oh, so I guess the father is the one who experienced, I'm trying to remember, experienced it backwards talking men.
Speaker: Yes. Which was kind of creepy, but also interesting. And then the Vietnam vet moves in with his wife and young daughter and sees the clown who's like insect and it's cloud mantis, which is just absurd. That just makes me laugh. It did me too, yeah. Yeah. And then there's a lighthouse, there's a field of sunflowers, different levels of danger, I think, in each of these scenarios. Yeah, some of the scenarios seemed pleasant.
Speaker: according to the people who experienced them. I guess I had kind of a different reaction than you to the variety of apparitions, phenomena, whatever we want to call it. It kind of made me more skeptical.
Speaker: And I don't know what this says about me, but I was just thinking there's no way these could all possibly be connected. Like this just seems like a grab bag. The ending that seems to be somewhat endorsed by the author is that these were the dreams of someone, which dreams are pretty varied. So I guess that part made sense. Yeah. What did you think of that, that this is just a portal where you can walk into someone's dreams? I hate that idea.
Speaker: Why? Because the ending it was all a dream is just too cliche and trite. And I think the story is a bit more clever than that. The sunflower god is something that makes me think that there's there's something more than just walking into Scott Walker's dreams. Because he talks about asking questions that don't have answers and he lost his family because he pursued those answers.
Speaker: And he apologizes to his wife and daughter. And then he says, the old world is gone. Only the field and the flowers and the one who put them there, he has promised to teach me. I have promised to listen. If I listen, everything will be okay. I'll hail the sunflower god.
Speaker: And then that other story about Moorhead, who somehow carried the portal with him in his eye, and he could see the other world in his eye no matter where he was physically, and then gouges out his eyes and writes, all hail the sunflower god. It feels like the sunflower god is something that exists outside of Scott Walker's dreams. So he maybe had access to this world or, you know, he was a visionary, he could see something that was true in his dreams.
Speaker: So you think there's a chance that there really is some kind of portal? Yeah, and I don't think this word is used in the book, but it's a word I thought of and it's entanglement, like quantum entanglement. I think it's possible that Walker's dreams got entangled with whatever force
Speaker: creates the portal. And I wonder, is the sunflower god some kind of intelligent being that benefited from the portal somehow? Yeah, I mean, we certainly don't know a lot about him or her or it.
Speaker: I would say that's also one of the stronger themes throughout the book is that there's an entanglement, access to some other real dimension or place through this house. Yep. Some of the people investigated the house. They're trying to do like a full scientific investigation. It was a brother and a sister. And the sister's report is quoted here. The house on Abigail Lane was not built on ancient burial ground or possessed by the spirits of the dead.
Speaker: One must always assume the dead have better things to do than exist just to pacify our fear of death. Everything we knew suggested a metaphysical aberration. We stepped over the threshold of an ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood and over the threshold of modern knowledge. It is not a place steeped in old evil. It's a calamity of physics. There's a fissure, a gaping cosmic wound, a door to places we can't begin to fathom.
Speaker: So I like this idea of a fissure in reality, and that existed before the house was built. And I think we get the hint at the end of the book that it'll continue to exist, even though Walker is dead and the house has been torn down.
Speaker: So my question is, is there something about building a house around the Fisher that amplifies it? There's a tie here with imagination, right? Like Scott Walker is an author, he imagines things for a living. And I don't think that's a coincidence. I think that was very intentional. And there's something about building house human
Speaker: creativity, human drive to build a structure? And what do we imagine around a house? And what does that do for this Fisher in reality? Does it make it stronger? It's interesting, because in other haunted house stories, we've talked about how the house is a focus of emotional expectation,
Speaker: certain types of hope or expectations, actually, I think is one of the best words. But that's related to imagination but very different. Is a house a seat of imagination? In some ways, yeah, because you're, you know, in every house, every home, you imagine the kind of life you would want.
Speaker: Perhaps if you're lucky, you're taking steps to build that, and you feel like you're moving towards what you imagined. But is it the best vehicle for imagination? I mean, what if a theater had been built on this spot or something like that, right? Yeah. Well, that reminds me of another quote from the blogger, Windale. In his recording, he calls the house a shameful symbol, and it represents the fragility of the American dream. Oh, that's right. These are Walker's dreams.
Speaker: Yeah. So what does the house represent in our imagination? Well, okay. So your question was like, what if it was a theater? Like what's a better vehicle? Well, okay. But I like this trying to connect, you know, American dream. We talked about it, paralleling American history maybe, but also imagination. But those are very different types of imagination. Speculative fiction versus the sort of vision of domestic bliss that I think of as sort of
Speaker: There's imagination in both of those, but of very different kinds, right? Right. I mean, the house is something you go into. And I think people go into these worlds. House is seclusion, too. So they disappear and they don't come back. If it's in a theater, if the Fisher's in a theater, is it something that you witness but you don't go into? Like a movie? I don't know. This may be taking it too far. Well, I think seclusion is interesting because that's been a huge part of the other haunted house stories, both
Speaker: You know, the resident is somehow trapped financially, or it is just physically in a removed spot, as in the hunting of Hill House. Or, you know, regardless, there's something that makes the inhabitants isolated from their neighbors, emotionally, mentally, perhaps physically as well. But I don't have that sense here. And part of that is because most of the book is talking about what people know about the house, what people think about the house, how that's changed over time. This is very much a view from outside the house. Hmm.
Speaker: And people bring their own expectations to what they think the house is doing. So, I mean, one theme throughout the whole book was people seeking fame based on the occurrences of the house.
Speaker: And that's something that starts right from the 1970s. He notes that the husband of the woman who disappeared, of Sandy, the real estate agent, he liked giving interviews about her disappearance a little too much. He got fame hungry and he wrote a book. And in the book, which was written about 20 years later, he vastly expanded his account of what happened.
Speaker: And the author says that's true for a lot of the people who either coincidentally had connection to the house or they sought it out because they wanted touch with something famous. In fact, there's this quote about, in the new millennium, secrets became harder to keep. The house was about to go viral.
Speaker: This is the story of a famous haunted house. And that's very different from a haunted house that is secret and you discover it when you move in and live there and have to live through that experience. Right. This is also the book that is the most recently written. So there is a social media piece of it.
Speaker: And there's so much parallel with social media that the house is about to go viral, but also our narrator, our investigator, is looking at public record about the house and he's able to find the public record on social media. Walker's daughter is watching videos and she finds the video of
Speaker: Mike, the documentarian disappearing. So people have an interaction, like Walker's daughter has an interaction with the house. She never even goes there. Windale, the blogger, he has these performances, I don't know, he has these events where people come to listen to him talk about the history of the house, but they don't go inside. And people feel that they're not getting their full money's worth because, and then he mentions other houses like the Winchester House where people can go in and have a tour.
Speaker: They want to go inside and Wendell doesn't let them. I mean, it's kind of a natural continuation.
Speaker: of what we've talked a lot about with the other haunted house stories, which is where the individuals in the haunted house reflect the haunted house and shape the manifestations, let's say. Okay, well, if that's a basic principle of haunted houses, it feels like this escalates that to next step, which is, well, then how would a bunch of people like the public's thoughts about a haunted house shape the house?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean there are a couple instances of what you mentioned the cats and dogs gathering outside the house and sort of being mesmerized and then they snap out of it. And then it happened close together where people find themselves mesmerized and find themselves like standing outside the house staring at it. But then there's also I think like Satanists went intentionally to go and pray and chant around the house.
Speaker: That's interesting that both of those things happen. They happen close together in the story where it's like unwilling people get drawn to the house and then also willing people get drawn to the house.
Speaker: Yes, and you're talking about the cats and the people who get sort of mesmerized by it. There's actually a lot about screens here, particularly in the end of it. They say that the images of these scenes, which I guess are that person's dreams, it says they look like a screen that you then step into and through.
Speaker: It didn't look 3D. It looked like a screen that you then stepped through, right? There's no suggestion that, you know, if it was a door, maybe the wind would blow some of the sand through into the house or something. But no, it's a screen that you step through.
Speaker: Yeah, and that happens with the documentarian. So that would seem to suggest, like, why does the documentarian see many different scenes, right? Like, everyone else we know about only experienced one of these other places. But Mike, the documentarian, sees a flashing of all of them. And is that related to the broader knowledge of the house? Because it has gone viral, that it has more activity
Speaker: And because it's got viral on a screen. He expects to see a variety of manifestations, and so he does. And then also, you know, he's a documentarian. He makes movies. So maybe it comes in that format. You know, it's a little bit tailored for him, like we've seen in other stories.
Speaker: How does he disappear? Does he step into it? Yes, I thought so. As opposed to what? As opposed to being swallowed by it. I thought he just stepped through it. Oh, okay. So it says, it's being narrated by his girlfriend who is watching on the video cameras they had set up to catch occurrences, which is interesting in and of itself. And she says,
Speaker: The sand rolled away ahead of him, within the world, as if something was alive beneath it, or as if his presence had caused a kind of shockwave. He had time to look up at the camera one last time before the screen, the door, the whatever it was, snap shut behind him.
Speaker: It's interesting that the world reacts to him entering. I mean she says that that proves it was no illusion. It was real. So I don't know entirely what to make of that, but I did have something I wanted to point out about the video cameras. So he has video cameras set up in there running 24 -7 for like 14 months because he wants to capture some
Speaker: occurrence in this empty house, which I think is first an interesting assumption that anything would happen if there weren't people there. And second, that it would be something that could be recorded. You know, if it's supernatural, who says it's something that can be recorded, right? Maybe it just doesn't show up on those wavelengths.
Speaker: Maybe it destroys any technology. But I think that was a very interesting assumption that it would be something so impersonal that it could be recorded. Does that make sense? Sure. So it's yeah, it's a tangible physical reality. You're assuming that it's a tangible physical phenomenon and rather than something that just gets into your head. Right. Yeah, I mean, I guess maybe he's just a skeptic. So that makes sense. It's like,
Speaker: you know Bigfoot is probably some kind of big ape so you can he sheds fur and you can find out what he eats from looking at his droppings I guess. But I also think there's kind of an in -between there. I'm thinking back to The Shining where the stuff that happened to those characters
Speaker: involved the real world like the clocks changed you know that hallucination of the butler could actually open the pantry door but no one other than jack saw the butler so it was both real and acting in the world but also a personally tailored hallucination i wonder if there is such a thing as personally tailored apparitions in the world of this book where there's assumption that any phenomena can be seen by everyone well sandy felt called and the world that she saw
Speaker: was benevolent. And Walker describes that as a world he imagined for his first girlfriend and him to get away from any distraction. And that's where Sandy went. I think we can assume that. At least that's what she saw the first time she experienced something and came back and was able to describe it.
Speaker: And then when she comes back for real, she doesn't seem tortured. So in that case, it seems to have responded to her desire for something good and larger than this basic life, I guess. Yeah. Cause she seemed kind of like a dreamer, romantic, an optimist, but that also happened in the seventies. So could that have still happened in say 2018 or would the wait
Speaker: of everyone's knowledge about the house, the fact that the house has gone viral, could you still have a personally tailored world within the haunted house? Or is it impossible now? Yeah. Well, people expect it to be scary and evil, even though our researcher says it's definitely not evil. And they also expect it to be, I think, exciting in certain specific ways, dramatic in specific ways. And explainable. Yeah.
Speaker: Kind of expect it to be a good show, frankly, right? Yes. That's the viral side of it, right? Like it's, something goes viral cause it's entertaining. No other reason, right? Yeah. I mean, I think, and I've said this before, you know, in the other episodes that I think haunted houses, the other stories we've read had a lot to do with privacy and isolation and solitude. And is that something you really have anymore?
Speaker: I mean, in general, not just for a haunted house that's become famous, but is a house a really, is it really a separate world anymore when we're connected all the time to everything and everyone? Yeah. Can you tell me again about the Puritan, you were reading about Puritan attitudes toward houses. Okay. So I read this wonderful book called The Way We Never Were.
Speaker: by Stephanie Kuntz and it's about, it's a history of the American family and all the varieties that that has been a part of. But one of the things she says is that this idea of privacy is actually a fairly recent idea, both because people used to live with many more people within the same walls, and this is for all income levels, but particularly if they were impoverished, you could expect to live with other families in the same tenement, for example.
Speaker: But even middle -class, wealthier people, you tended to have an extended family under one roof and you tended to be much closer to your neighbor. So whatever privacy you had in your house or thought you had, your neighbors could hear you. And we know this from Puritan court records, for example, there was no conception that the house was a private place that a non -resident
Speaker: would ask permission to enter into. It was treated as what we would call now a public square. And so that comes up in court records because that's how a lot of things like adultery were discovered because people would just walk into their neighbor's house to say hi, to borrow something. There was not this stop and knock and maybe they'll let you in or maybe not, but it would be a faux pas to enter without permission. So privacy and the expectation of it and of silence and solitude
Speaker: I think is kind of a post 1950s suburban home, large yard development. And I think my personal theory is kind of that haunted house stories kind of reflect that, you know, because before that time period, a lot of the haunted house stories.
Speaker: are rich people's haunted houses, right? Because that's the only way you could have a big house by itself. You were really rich and you was out in the country. But you get the sort of democratization of haunted houses after the 50s, but maybe that period's over because there's nothing that has that solitude. You know, isolated, rich, poor, nothing has it anymore.
Speaker: Right. And I think with with social media, especially even in your own head or your own perception of self, we present ourselves a certain way on social media. And I think that gets confusing. And this entanglement idea of this house on Abigail Lane, I'm just going to say that, like, that's the explanation for everything. Every question I have is like, oh, it's entanglement in this talk.
Speaker: Because this idea of like, what's inside the house, what's outside the house? Is it about one person's mind? Is it about other worlds? It's that confusion and what's the public perception versus a private experience?
Speaker: That all seems to be connected somehow. It's like the house doesn't belong to anyone family. It belongs to everyone. But it's also an enclosed private space because no one lives there. And when you go in there, you risk disappearing forever. You're right. So there are still boundary lines.
Speaker: the crossing of which can potentially cause problems, even if we're saying there's a breakdown in privacy and an excess of publicness, whatever that means. But maybe that's why it's so appealing, right? The idea that there is one specific place that has these boundary lines and these consequences, right?
Speaker: most places have come to seem very similar due to social media, right? Like your house is where you go to be yourself and to learn yourself, I guess, to like contemplate, I mean, ideally be alone with your thoughts. Yeah. Is that true though? Like when you, depending on your relationship to social media, I guess, but all kinds of social media have increased the pressure to have a lovely and picturesque home because you
Speaker: take pictures in it, you show it off more. Certainly working from home increased the expectation to have a nice background, a nice setup. That was kind of a violation of privacy if you think about it. I mean, worth it overall.
Speaker: Is it really this separate place where you have your special thoughts and feelings and it can potentially be a pressure cooker for all sorts of things, good, but also bad. And that's where we get our haunted house story. Yeah. Is that true? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think I wouldn't say that seclusion or isolation is definitely be good or bad. That's what the haunted house stories tell us. And I think this Abigail Lane story adds the modern
Speaker: challenge of social media because it's no longer about physical barriers because you put things on online and it's a different kind of
Speaker: intimacy, it's a different kind of knowledge, the relationships you build online. And that that's why we have a different kind of haunted house. Yeah, a kind of a haunted house, that's a reflection of what everybody has thought about it and said about it. The ending is really kind of interesting in this light, because, you know, 90 % of the book is about what the public thinks of this house. But then at the end, it's someone's dreams, which is the definition of
Speaker: like private interiority inside someone's head, but also everyone has access to it through the house. Oh, yes. That's horrifying for sure. I mean, there's potentially another explanation to the documentarian before he steps through the portal. He says, I think this is someone's dreams.
Speaker: And then Mike Walker watches that video. So that idea was given to him. So maybe that's part of what created it. There's an expectation there too. Did you understand what was trying to be told? Because Walker goes to the house and he experiences the smell of motor oil, but nothing much more.
Speaker: And then he returns home and he's like, oh no, I have gone through. Like this is not the world. This is something somewhere else because his daughter and his wife are different and don't have eyes. And they found his recorder miles away in a field. Okay, so that's terrifying because it implies he did actually leave the house and did actually find that the house or that world, whatever you want to call it, had spread to somewhere else.
Speaker: Okay, possibly. I thought he went through, he got sucked through and found a bizarro world of our world. But then how would his recorder be so far away? Why wouldn't it be on the stairs like everything else? That's a good question. And I couldn't figure out if that field was supposed to be the lot where the house was. I couldn't figure out, I don't know. Is it a field at the end? Yeah. Yeah, my assumption was that it was saying this lot
Speaker: is now empty, the whole neighborhood's been torn down, it's going to be a mall. But with what you point out about what happened to Mike Walker, which implies the phenomenon are no longer limited to the house, maybe it doesn't matter what happens to that lot. It gets loose in the world now. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, I mean, before we had the guy who could see through his eye, so that was... I think you should explain what that was, because I don't think we mentioned it in the summary.
Speaker: that Morehead, he's technically blind in one eye, but he claims that he can see the other worlds through that eye. And he'd be blind in the house, right? Yeah. I don't remember exactly what happened. He experienced something, and when he left the house, he was blind in that eye.
Speaker: They saw a cataract, a yellow cataract, which was later identified as a sunflower. And he's the one who gouges out both his eyes and writes, all hail the sunflower god. And that was kind of interesting because he was experiencing those phenomena when he was outside of the house. So it's again that Fisher is like a focus point, but maybe it's not the only place where people can cross between these different realities.
Speaker: It's not a limitation. It's just where it was initially strongest or something like that. Yeah. We don't really know. It's not really clear if Walker actually came out back into the real world or disappeared somewhere else or if it just like made him crazy. And he like, we don't know if his wife and daughter were actually alive or did they disappear too? Like that's not told to us.
Speaker: So I found that extremely disturbing. Like the whole section of The Walker, I sped through it. I had to go back and make myself read it again because I found it very disturbing. I did too. Yeah, I didn't know entirely what to make of that. Should we talk about genre themes? We don't really have a lot for this book because it kind of stands out. Yeah, on that note, I have one more question. So the format of this book
Speaker: as we have said repeatedly, it reads more like a Reddit post than a novel. I think you and I both commented on it doesn't really have the interior life of the character and character development, which is what I want in a novel. Sounds like what you want too. So is a haunted house novel different from a haunted house story? This one seems like a story. I think what you and I have
Speaker: than seeking out our haunted house novels hmm i think it opened my mind to the idea of like what a haunted house story could be because first of all i i don't read a lot of haunted house stories i don't read a lot of horror i have to be in the right mindset or else it just upsets me so
Speaker: So yeah, my concept of a haunted house story is that it's psychological somehow, that whatever the haunting is, is some kind of reflection or personal torture for our characters who are in the haunted house. And so this is different, and I liked experiencing something different. But that makes me wonder, and maybe we can talk about this in depth when we review our whole season of haunted house stories at the end of this season,
Speaker: What makes a haunted house story? I think that location is interesting. There has to be a spot with a house on it. And why does that become a focal point for weird things happening? Whether this story is clear that it has nothing to do with dead humans. The dead have better things to do.
Speaker: So what is it about a place? What is it about the structure of a house? I think we've talked a lot about it. Like suburban America, this Abigail Lane was built in the 1950s. I think that's very telling of like why houses and why suburbia, how that affected culture in America. Tell me what you think. What do you think? What's the difference between a haunted house novel and a haunted house story?
Speaker: I didn't realize until I read this book that I had a pretty narrow definition of both haunted house and novel. And they were actually very parallel, right? You are sort of restricted to a psychology or a couple, you know, you're inside one person's head or a couple, they are interacting in some way. You know, obviously, there's one location because of the house.
Speaker: And there's sort of a unitary story. It's probably continuous in time. It has a beginning, middle, and end about these people or this person. This book does neither of those. It's not particularly about the internal experiences of anyone living through the house.
Speaker: It's not maybe even not even about a particular place by the end of it. It's about what people think of it and maybe it's moved beyond the bounds of the house. So this book was great for making me realize what I was expecting. By not giving you what you expect.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm not giving it to me. I have read plenty of horror online that has this sort of investigatory format where lots of people are contributing, and some of it's interesting to me, and some of it is not. And other people reading it pick up on different things. But I think that sort of collaborative horror story is very different. By definition, there's not a through thread. There's not one idea. You're not getting one authorial voice
Speaker: with one definite conception of how it works you're getting little pieces of everything and i feel like you know you and i hit on some of the same things we'd like some of the same things but
Speaker: I didn't even know for sure if they were actually the real themes or it was just sort of a Rorschach test because there was so much in this book and you and I found the things we were interested in and we talked about them, right? Yeah. I mean, is that not true for every book? Well, I personally, I think, and the way we've set up this podcast is that we don't look into authorial attempt. We don't look at what the authors have said about their stories.
Speaker: Because the story is the final authority. The written word is final authority, not what so -called experts or not even what the author says. That's why I like fiction. And I've heard authors say that when they write, if you write good characters, they
Speaker: develop a mind of their own. The authors have expressed this feeling of not having control over the characters they create. And I like that about fiction, that it's not an essay and we're not trying to discern an author's argument or point. That's what makes fiction valuable because it is all basically a Rorschach test. I agree to a certain extent.
Speaker: You know, I think once a book is written or a work of art is created, it is out of the artist's hands. They may not even know what it's about. I think, but I do think in order for it to be a work of art, there has to be a unitary idea and a meaning.
Speaker: I like the feeling that there is one even if I don't always get it, like Haunting of Hill House. I don't think I understood that novel at all. I think there was something specific to understand and it is like a puzzle I still want to crack and it being a puzzle makes me want to go back over and over again. I don't feel that way about this book. I feel like it was interesting. I think you and I have had a great conversation because
Speaker: Frankly, I think we brought a lot to it, but it didn't have that feeling to me of, you know, you're reading the product of a single mind that has spent hours, maybe years coming up with what they want to say about this, you know, and that's what I want. And it's kind of, other formats can be entertaining, interesting, lead to good conversation, but to me, there's a big gulf between the two of them.
Speaker: I want to note this because this is an indie published book. And when we do our wrap up, and I hope this is a conversation that will continue for many seasons of the podcast about many different genres, is this a quality of indie published books? Because as someone who knows about an author who does self publishing, there's this with the different business structure of self publishing, does that
Speaker: create different kinds of storytelling. And I hope we will get into that as we continue the podcast. I hope so. And I will say I'm aware there's a huge problem with relying on classics, because those have been filtered through so many generations of gatekeepers. And of course, you only get certain types of stories. And I certainly don't want to do that. So I'm very glad that you suggested this.
Speaker: Cool. Are we ready for genre themes? I'll be very sure. So genre themes. What were they? Yeah. Well, so one, I think maybe we could call a genre theme that the house amplifies mental challenges and strong feelings like despair or depression. And reflects what people bring to it to some extent.
Speaker: Right. I mean, I think this is really true with that veteran suffering from PTSD, and it is explicit in the story. The author writes that the veteran had PTSD before coming to the house, the house amplified it, and he was not able to recover in any way. He ended up committing suicide many years later. Yeah. That's also true with the real estate agent
Speaker: And both of those were in the seventies earlier on in the history of the house. I don't know if that's relevant, but it seems that the, the weight of public perception grows stronger over time. And maybe at some point I'm imagining sort of two forces pushing back on each other. Like the house can push back strongly on individuals, but maybe now there's a weight of public perception that's pushing back stronger and stronger as time goes on. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, but other than that, because this was not focused on someone's experience in the house, there were a lot of themes that we didn't see. So things we did not see, being warned by townspeople, being trapped in the house, people, if they weren't immediately sucked up into the other whatever realm, they were able to escape. Yeah, there was not really an analysis of family dynamics or
Speaker: creating a family unit, nothing like that. We did not have the, oh, this house was built on the site of some horror, a graveyard where some terror happened. In fact, it was specifically disclaimed, which was nice. Yeah, so it was really different in a lot of ways.
Speaker: Final thoughts, Caroline? I really enjoyed reading this and talking about it and comparing it with the other books. It's made me think a lot about other media for horror, mediums for horror, not just novels, but comparing novels with the stories I read online, which I've done for years.
Speaker: and how each is maybe oriented towards a different type of horror and effect on people. So I'm going to keep thinking about that for sure. I thought it was really interesting. I enjoyed reading it. The format is fun overall. I can't say what I want to say because I want to compare it to our next book. So I'll save that for our next episode. You already read. Yes. Okay.
Speaker: Listeners, what did you think of The House on Abigail Lane? Have you read any other books by Keelan Patrick Burke? Do you have any thoughts about collaborative or crowdsourced horror and how it affects the experience? Let us know by recording a voice memo and emailing openingquestion at gmail .com. You can also complete the feedback form on our website at bookclubpod .com.
Speaker: We will read your responses and play your voice memos on our feedback episode at the end of the season. Our next book discussion will be On the House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson. Read with us. It's a wild story and inspiration for many horror authors and filmmakers. We'll release that episode in one week and you can get your copy by using the affiliate link in our show notes.
Speaker: The Book Club podcast is produced by Carly Jackson and Caroline Gorman. Audio editor is Alex Marcus. Thanks for listening.
