Schizoid masculinity and monstrous interiors in American haunted house narratives

Abstract

In this article, I propose that the haunted house narrative, so central to American Gothic, has itself mutated in response to a backdrop of post-millennial social, political and financial collapse in a manner quite different to developments in the rest of the Gothic literary world. The narrative strand which has emerged presents the reader with a new form of the Gothic male protagonist, whom the British psychologist R.D. Laing would describe as a ‘schizoid’ subject (Laing 17). Fragile, failing and fragmenting, he escapes a failing career, marriage and parenthood by removing his family to a quasi-domestic space which promises repair. Often combining work and home, the house rises up to meet the male schizoid, not merely as the traditional Gothic setting, but as a sentient being; a monster in its own right. His entrapment in this new Gothic labyrinth that is constantly shifting, expanding and shrinking, provides a performative stage on which the schizoid male is forced into an existential crisis beyond the trauma of spousal and parental failure, ultimately forcing him to confront what it is to exist in space and time.

A reaction to the rise of neo-liberalism and toxic masculinity, this type of narrative embraces the multiplicity of the Gothic’s new forms and is evident in texts such as Steve Rasnic Tem’s Deadfall Hotel (2012), Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Thomas Ligotti’s The Town Manager (2008), Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It (2017) and Shaun Hamilll’s A Cosmology of Monsters (2020). Developing from their deeper roots in the Calvinist Gothic tradition of Hawthorne, Brockden Brown and Poe via the midcentury works of Stephen King and Robert Marasco, these new post- millennial narratives provide a space in which notions of masculine subjectivity are fundamentally challenged