Kevin's Watch

...your sleep.

This has happened only rarely over the course of my 50 year reading history, and I don't much like it when it does. The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty managed it, as did The House on The Boarderland by William Hope Hodgeson. These are really only the two that I can remember, both read some thirty or so plus, years ago.

Untill last night.

I picked up a book called A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 years of Hunting for Proof by Roger Clarke from my library, and last night at midnight on returning from work began to read. The second chapter "The house that was haunted to death", recounted the factual events that led to the decamping of Mary Ricketts, a lady known for her common sense, from Hinton Ampner House near Selbourne UK in the year of 1771. The story was not grusome, nor fast paced, but the cumlative effect of the details as they were recounted covering her months of occupation of the house, were chilling and unpleasant in a way I haven't experienced for years. The story was not sensationalist - it didn't need to be. Each person who was called in to investigate and whose account has passed down through history, began in scepticism and progressed through amazement to trepidation and fear for the lady's safety. Her brother in law, a high ranking army officer and govornment oficial, stayed in the house for an extended period after which he wrote to the landlords that the house, in it's disturbed state was unfit for human habitation. He beseeched his sister in law to leave at once and never to return. At last the house was torn down and a new property constructed some distance away from the site of the old one. To this day the new house stands and is currently under the trusteeship of the National Trust, and enjoys many visitors each year to view it's rooms and gardens. Little is made of the former story, but the British Library hold the collected papers and reports dealing with this strange and un-nerving occurence.

[Incidentally - the events at Hinton Ampner are said to have been related by Archbishop Benson, the Archbishop of Cantabury, to Henry James, and are said to have formed the basis for his subsequent story 'The Turn of the Screw', more of which can be found on Wikipedia.]

this is the most recent book to disturb my sleep.
it had the residual effect of disturbing my waking hours as well.
it's very...unconventional. I actually remember being very paranoid
for a while after reading it. of what I don't now recall.
but so much so that tho I really wanted to reread it as it's VERY
dense, I just was too creeped out. so creeped out that I finally
had to just get rid of the book itself! lol!!!

and yet I have read that the author thinks of it as a love story.
and it probably is but the creepy parts REALLY creeped me out.

here's the wiki in case you wanna check it out




and here a good short essay/review of it that I liked.


prior to that I hadn't been disturbed or creeped out since Salem's Lot (1975) and prior to that, not since The Exorcist (1971) (which I read 3 times before the movie ever came out.)


oh. wait. I have to say that I now remember another book which disturbed me on a different sort of level. Neuropath by R Scott Bakker.

you can read about that in our watch discussion of the book. there are watchers that have a MUCH better handle on it than I ever did. (brinn, the sheriff, murrin, zarathustra, etc)

I think I wrote about it (in the above linked post) pretty fresh after finishing it and in rereading those posts I don't seem to have been as "disturbed" as I now remember being. I think it also had a residual effect. the further away from the reading I got, the more disturbed I got because it left that question in me for a long long time. urg. so I guess that was more recently than House of Leaves.

I don't think I've ever really been full-on disturbed to the level you mean here, but I did get a little bit paranoid and weird the night after finishing The Haunting of Hill House.

The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa. I'm not sure how, it is just... brutal. Not in Cormac McCarthy, horror, or even Donaldson way. There is probably more blood and gore in those books then in The War of the End of the World... but they are also often unreal and sometimes cartoonish. In Vargas' book, it was just vividly real. All the characters were just so...human. It is just really hard to condemn any of them even as their actions directly cause great suffering and death making it impossible to really root for them.

It also really gave you a different lens to look at things... at relationships, progress, peace, war, religion...etc. *shudder*

Thanks guys - some interesting stuff here, some I have come across before and some not. I think the thing that got to me in the book above was the clear and obvious truth of what I was reading. The account is factual [ie not in story form] and the events were plainly real to those involved even if suffering from some mass delusion or trickery. Horror [in it's broader sense] is 'doable', even if it creeps you, as long as you have that veil of fictionality to hide behind. What is not nice is to have the 'supernatural' thrust into your life in a way that is undeniable; you can rationalise it away - but at one 'o' clock in the morning in the dark it's harder. It's way easier not to have to think that 'it's out there' and when writing such as this tears away that comfort zone it 'aint nice.

Interesting thing - Clarke writes a very rational book and starts at the early pages by that the book is not about whether ghosts exist or not, but about what we see, what we experience when we see/hear a ghost. "Do you believe in ghosts?" he says, is a virtually meaninless question. To the question "Do people experience the apparitions and sensations we commonly inerpret as ghosts", he has one answer - absolutely!

Oooh, just saw this question! I think my answer is an odd one - "The Time Traveler's Wife," by Audrey Niffenegger.

What kind of person has difficulty falling asleep after reading "The Time Traveler's Wife"? Pfft...

OH!! you know what else disturbed me?! I've just thought of it now since reading your most recent post, peter...



yeah I DEFINITELY lost some sleep after reading this one. heh.
scared the bejesus outa me.

Wow, LuciMay lives.

--A

Do you think it was the 'trueness' that got to you LuciMay?

peter wrote:Do you think it was the 'trueness' that got to you LuciMay?

yeah the alleged trueness. (he's a fiction writer so right off the bat
you've got an unreliable narrator, right?)

it was the first time that it really hit home to me that I might be somebody's biology experiment. the frog, as it were.

as sorus would say... eep!

Damn Lucimay! I want to read this book - but that recent affair with the one I mention in my first post has kind of put me off being scared for a while. That account was plain nasty - not the kind of warm fuzzy 'ooohhh, it's scary' type of scared, but a 'there's shit out there that it's just plain better not to have inside your head' type of scary. I went to sleep with ghosts for days - and I ain't talking Casper - so I'm going to take your word for it and let it ride awhile.

wise decision.

also...don't see the movie Fire in the Sky.

no book has ever unnerved me. one film has, Eraserhead. all these years later and I still haven't rewatched it.

Now I've never seen 'Eraserhead' so can't comment on that one - but I don't like the 'Paranormal Activity' series. Latterly they haven't been so bad, bit 1 & 2 were quite unsettling. It was the 'banality' of the whole thing followed by the instantaneous ramping up of the woman being dragged from her bed - nasty! But I have to say they were not a patch on the book of my first post in terms of thier ability to un-nerve. I read two chapters of that book, the second really made me feel unsettled and then I wanted the book out of the house. I placed the book into the car and returned it to the library the following day. It seems stupid now - but I just had to do it at the time!

I believe i'll order that book, peter.

I can get it on kindle but i'm thinking i'd prefer paperback. just in case I decide I want to get rid of it. heh. (the history of ghosts book)

I remember It from Stephen King shook me up when I read it. Particularly the moment when the stuttering kid picks up the picture book and his brother winks at him from the photograph. I don't know why that was what shook me up - I guess the cumulative effect from all else I read and the tenseness that book generated, but after seeing that scene in the tv version, it just seemed kinda dumb visually portrayed.
When I was young and read Lord of the Rings, the initial encounter with the Black Rider where the four hobbits are hiding on the road, and the thing sniffs for the ring kept me up for nights as well.