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Houses That Kill
I have been working with houses professionally for over forty years. They intrigue me. They talk to me. I feel their pain when they are neglected or badly constructed or torn down and thrown in the dump like a pile of discarded bones. I feel very strongly that it is not the house’s fault when something bad happens to the occupants - most of the time.
And yet novels are written about the horrible things that happen in houses, as if somehow the house itself is evil. I don’t believe it. I think houses are taking the blame for the sins of the occupants.
A house is an assemblage of wood, stone, metal, glass, pipes, wires, and mechanical equipment. Just like Frankenstein was an assemblage of body parts. His evil qualities were imbued upon him by those that didn’t understand him. The house’s framing is the skeleton. The wires are the nerves. The pipes and the ducts are the veins and the lungs. The boiler or furnace is the heart.
There is no question that houses play major roles - often title roles - in many novels. They become part of the story in a variety of ways - just as the other characters do. Wuthering Heights begins, “I have just returned from a visit to my landlord - the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with.” Susan Howatch, the author of Penmarric, introduces the house as soon as she introduces the protagonist. Shirley Jackson, the author of The Haunting of Hill House, wastes no time, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within.” Daphne Du Maurier opens Rebecca with, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
Houses are shelters. Houses are homes. Not killers. They carve out a safe place to protect us from wind, rain, and snow. There are indeed mysterious places in houses - under the stairs, under the eaves, down in the basement, in the back corner of the attic where no one ever goes. Houses make strange noises - pipes banging, shutters thumping against the side of the house in the wind, the barometric damper in the flue clicking, the massive weight of the structure settling onto the foundation. Those mysterious places and sounds tantalize a story teller’s imagination. But it’s the ghosts in the occupant's imaginations and the guilts in their memories that are the killers and the perpetrators of the crimes.
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There are all sorts of things floating around in the air. Always have been. Always will be. Some volatile organic compounds are pleasant - like baking bread. Some are unpleasant like rotting rodents. VOCs are very, very small particles. Ozone, on the other hand, is a gas that won't be removed from the air no matter how restrictive the filter in the HVAC system is.
