The House next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons (pub.1978)

 House is a weird suburban novel in which a house is a malignant force. Its not even an ancient house with a grisly history and bold boltered rooms, a corpse half in and half out on the patio where glasses are broken and a cheeky little vintage of no great authority breathes for the dead and dying.  The echo of the boy or girl next door in the title with its imputation of ordinary health lies.  This house’s  jouissance is marred by an abstract vengance though it is brand new with a brand new couple moving in expecting a new child.  Newness, brightness and hope are revived on a lot that was deemed to be impossible to build on until the young genius architect worked his Frank Lloyd Wright on it producing a dream design that everyone loves.

Colquitt the narrator thought it couldn’t be done and at first resented the noise, fuss and tree felling that was going to take away frontage and sideage and the leafiness oh the leafiness from her office room where she planned to curate a few clients in her public relations business. However when it was built its beauty made her ‘fall in love’ with it.  Husband Walter also in an advertising executive role as the co-owner of an agency that is doing quite well.  The author Anne Rivers Siddons worked for an ad agency once so the consciousness of refined, classy but understated glamour which uses wealth with taste and discernment in the manner of an upmarket glossy is well depicted.  All the elements of gracious Southern living in an enclave that runs to extreme wealth with butlers to its just us, plain folks.  Automobiles are named if they are vulgar, like Cadillac or BMW Bavaria.  

This house is mad, bad and dangerous to live in.  Siddons very skillfully gives you a sense of the growing dismay of the Kennedys as they realise that a monstrous fate befalls  the inhabitants of this jonah house.  Is it just bad luck or what or just a series of coincidence that befall first the Harralsons, then the Sheehans and finally the Greenes.  Excuse the pun; the plot really builds and even as the Kennedys visit they find themselves in the penumbra of evil.  What can they do about it?

To begin the omens are light:

"Much later I awoke and heard an owl in the woods on the lot next door. We don’t get many of them in the city; I could not remember the last time I had heard one. It was, for some reason, a truly dreadful sound. I lay listening to it, something wild and heavy uncurling in my chest. And I reached down carefully, so as not to wake Walter, and I tied a knot in the corner of the top sheet."

Might be a winding sheet yet but I’ll say no more.  This is excellent, a classic really.  It has the Stephen King imprimatur, bad housekeeping award.  I concur.

Ellen Terhune by Edmund Wilson (from Memoirs of Hecate County)

I always felt, when I went to the Terhune house, that I was getting back into the past – or rather, perhaps, that an atmosphere which had first been established at the beginning of the eighties, when the house in which she lived had been built, had been preserved there as a vital medium down into the nineteen twenties.

Pay close attention to that opening sentence for in it is established the house as time machine or the projective vehicle of its chatelaine Ellen Terhune who is subject to strange absences. The story in its way is an exploration of that puzzle beloved of time travel theorists, the grandfather paradox. In this case the target is more the mother paradox. Go back to that stage to halt her marriage and thus the pregnancy which issued in Ellen. The time traveller is the narrator of the tale and as he goes back his modern clothes are noted much as he notes the retro styles of the 'persons' that he encounters. To cross into this imaginal domain he has to physically enter the Terhune place and be transported by Ellen who is one of her spells. (Hecate how are you) She tells us:

I've always been a little bit scared by these states that I was telling you about, and I thought it might be a good thing to take hold of them and deliberately exploit them – to try and put them outside myself.

Her intention is to alter her own past definitively so that she no longer exists in an unacceptable present in which she is creatively stuck. She is a composer and Wilson describes her impasse through the rendering of a sonata that is working on.

At the end, the ghost of a second theme limped off and dropped away in irremediable speciousness and impotence, and we were back with the same confounded phrase, which was never satisfactorily resolved, but simply repeated eight times at precisely the same loudness and tempo.

As I mentioned in a previous postgrail cup one can be in one of those imaginal realms and not know it so the narrator does not get spooked by the change in the appearance of the house. There is no immediate confrontation with another plane that is known to be such. To me the element of changing the future by altering the past is the predominant feature of the tale so I would put it into the category of time travel fiction.

To alter a phrase; yes I know, one that was never uttered, Beam me up Scot, there are little notes which put us in mind of the man for whom he was the conscience.

I turned away my mind, I confess, with a certain complacent relief to a big party I looked forward to that evening; one of those gathering where great quantities of tan-backed girls and scarlet-faced men, with highballs fizzing in their hands, lift laughing and strident voices among glass-topped cocktail tables and lamps that give indirect lighting.

There's that jaded lost generation note, the seed of Carraway so to speak:

I would feel suddenly after lunch or dinner that living in the country was hopeless, that I had no communication with other people, and that nothing I was doing meant anything; yet on the other hand I could not see any hope in living in the city or travelling: I knew what other human beings were – they might be more or less picturesque in their various environments and climates, and to the young this was a source of excitement; but to me, on the verge of thirty, it was desolatingly, incontrovertibly evident that people under any conditions, were the same wry pathetic freaks, and why should I go to the trouble of moving about among them in order to observe the shapes which their defects and distortions could take?

That's shown as one long sentence though there might be a misprint of a colon for a full stop after 'travelling'. Still he can't be faulted for his mastery of the archetectonic of narrative balance. He moves along very smoothly in a manner that is old-fashioned in the best way.