The Institute (2019) by Stephen King: Novel: Stephen King returns to the world of psychic children in his new novel with mostly positive results.
The eponymous Institute kidnaps children and puts them to work doing... what? Well, if I told you, I'd spoil the novel. Suffice to say that the people behind the Institute believe that the ends justify the means and that they're the good guys.
They really must think they're the good guys because they've been killing a whole lot of children for decades. And their families. King remains fairly ruthless throughout the novel, making things seem more plausible. There's a heck of a death toll, both depicted and implied, and the vast majority of those deaths are children between the ages of about 8 and 14.
But soon after the novel begins, the Institute makes one mistake -- they kidnap a boy genius. They didn't kidnap him because he's a boy genius. Human intelligence is irrelevant to their aims. Well, until it interferes with them.
King plays a bit with structure in the novel, beginning with a secondary protagonist -- a former police officer who goes walkabout and ends up as the Night Knocker in a small Southern town. After about 50 pages, we jump to our primary protagonist. A beginning writer would probably be told not to do this shift. But King can do what he wants -- and the structure does cause suspense insofar as we wonder how events in demon-haunted Maine (where the Institute is located) and the Southern whistle-stop will dovetail.
In all, it's enjoyable and fairly tight. The characterization of the children is typically astute. And the characterization of the assorted antagonists, while occasionally one-note, makes sense when one considers that they're people doing terrible things for what they believe is a noble cause. That's going to disconnect one from empathy -- or require people with low empathy from the get-go. It's also the only King novel I can think of in which probability calculations play a major role. Recommended.
The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson: 60 years after its first publication, The Haunting of Hill House remains the finest haunted-house novel in the English language, its nearest competitor a very distant second.
There's not much to say that hasn't been said already. Maybe nothing. Re-reading it again, I noted at how deftly Shirley Jackson balances the entire novel between two possible explanations, with a number of possibilities between them, right to the last words of the novel. And nevertheless leaves Hill House itself a horrifying mystery to linger in the mind long after one has finished the novel.
The Haunting of Hill House has proven to be almost unadaptable. The great 1960's adaptation dropped a huge amount of relevant material in order to fit into a two-hour window. The solid 2018 miniseries pretty much threw in the towel on any attempt at a straight adaptation and instead constructed an alternate narrative with entirely different character representations and plot beats. And the 1999 film adaptation was an unholy abomination about which we will no longer speak.
Jackson's novel is about as densely packed as one could ask of such an elegant, often sardonic piece of work. Eleanor's story is a tragedy of forced servitude -- as the unmarried sister, she was expected to care for her ailing mother for nearly two decades. She's either the perfect foil for the house, or the perfect time bomb ready to go off.
Her fellow characters, ostensibly there at the behest of a professor to investigate the famous ghost house that is Hill House, are sharply drawn, though the reader must be aware of how often their personalities are refracted by Eleanor's shifting perspective.
You will have your own answers to the mysteries of Hill House, and your own reactions to the marvelous characters whom Jackson puts in mortal peril at the hands of... What? Hill House is a bit of a paradox in American horror: a Lovecraftian horror rendered in entirely non-Lovecraftian prose and parameters. But in Hill House, as in sunken R'lyeh, all the angles are wrong. Highly recommended.
Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death by Deborah Blum (2006): The afterlife was a big concern of the 19th century in Europe and North America, especially ways to prove its existence with newfangled scientific methods. And the occult had risen to new heights as religion began to recede, in a manner that looks an awful lot like our world.
But former science reporter Deborah Blum's focus here is on the great American philosopher William James and a small group of American, British, and Australian scientists who took it upon themselves to investigate psychic phenomena between the 1880's and the early 20th century.
For all its flaws, this is a fascinating book. And even the flaws are fascinating because they seem to replicate the flaws of the investigations of James and others without Blum realizing it, or acknowledging it. Overall, James and his friends demonstrate what would eventually become a fact in skeptical circles: scientists are not very good at investigating the paranormal.
If you want to test a psychic or a medium or a spoon-bender, you need people with training and expertise in prestidigitation and in the area of "cold reading" and assorted other psychological ploys used to get information out of people without those people being aware that they've given that information.
Nonetheless, these scientists did some interesting things. Their "Hallucination Census" has, if nothing else, a great name. And they did uncover a wide variety of spiritual and psychic frauds. That they seem to have been hornswoggled by a few mediums and psychics isn't surprising: confronted by the deaths of loved ones, tormented by lost loves, far too many of these investigators wanted to believe. Just like Fox Mulder. And it left all their research in question.
One of the oddities completely missed by Blum is the fact that virtually all the major psychics of the time were women, in a world that mostly barred women from professional and academic work. Hmm. How strange. And while Blum touches briefly upon a few scandals attached to the investigation of mostly female psychics by mostly male researchers, she doesn't go into detail about how many of these investigations worked.
Keep in mind that the scenes set in some of these psychic testing rooms look like something out of a porn movie: the female psychic naked and supposedly immobilized by the hands of several men; the tendency of some female psychics to perform in the nude; the covert sexuality of many of the mediumistic sittings (one medium painted a baby's face on one of her breasts and had mourning parents kiss this 'face' of their lost children); the full-body searches enacted again and again; and the extreme sexual assertiveness of many of the female mediums.
James didn't conduct the enquiries himself, though he was an ardent and public supporter of them. Some of the investigators did pretty solid work. Others were, in the carnival parlance, rubes. Still, this is an interesting and often moving exploration of people seeking for new answers to old questions, even if I think the author ultimately falls into many of the same traps as her subjects.
One of the fundamental problems with the text is that Blum never explains fully to the reader how one of the favourite mediums of James and his investigators actually conducted her sessions. Was she randomly spouting out impossible-to-know information without prompting, or was there a dialogue going on? In truth, it seems that there was a dialogue going on, and that the infallible psychic was at the very least doing some form of reading of her questioners.
Blum dismisses in a few lines what happened with this favourite medium when a new team of investigators tested her: she failed utterly, inventing intimate details about fictional family members the investigators created for the purposes of the test and failing to do much of anything when it came to the past lives of real dead people. Beyond this, there were apparently (mostly unmentioned by Blum) endless sessions with the medium that generated false information. When it comes to selection bias, why did Blum select this counter-material almost completely out of the book? Hidey ho. So it goes. Recommended.
Insidious, written by Leigh Whannell, directed by James Wan, starring Patrick Wilson (Josh Lambert), Rose Byrne (Renai Lambert), Ty Simpkins (Dalton Lambert), Barbara Hershey (Lorraine Lambert), Lin Shaye (Elise Rainier), Leigh Whannell (Specs) and Angus Sampson (Tucker) (2011): Surprisingly 'old-school' ghost story given that the writer and director are best known for their work on the hardcore Saw films. If it weren't for the last twenty minutes and the subsequent, exhausted 'twist' ending, this would be a really solid film.
Young Dalton Lambert goes into a medically inexplicable coma. His family searches for answers. Weird things happen. A psychic is consulted. More weird things happen. That's the movie with the major twists and revelations unrevealed.
Wan and Whannel get a lot of productive mileage out of showing little and suggesting a lot, of quick scares and odd things lurking in the outskirts of the frame. The cosmology introduced by the psychic to explain what's going on makes a certain amount of sense, though it's not developed enough to be all that convincing for long. A visual homage to Neil Gaiman's Sandman series is a bit jarring; that one supernatural entity looks an awful lot like Darth Maul undercuts a certain amount of tension.
Rose Byrne is a stand-out as the worried mother. Byrne's face in repose tends to look sad anyway -- I think it's her eyebrows -- and the look suits the material. Patrick Wilson is fine as the father, who has supernatural secrets of his own, though he appears to lose about 50 IQ points in the last twenty minutes. When the psychic tells you not to draw attention to yourself, don't run around yelling at every supernatural entity you encounter, that's all I've got to say.
The movie also joins the horror sub-sub-sub-genre of 'Monsters who love novelty songs,' as one entity really likes Tiny Tim's "Tiptoe Through the Tulips," which was already terrifying enough on its own. Hell's playlist must be really awful. Recommended.
