The Haunting by Joan Lowery Nixon is a mystery novel about how a teenage girl learns about the brave women in her family who did not even go near their famous haunted plantation, Graymoss. Fifteen year old Lia Starling just received the message that her great grandmother is giving her mother Anne, the property of Graymoss plantation. It has been kept in good care since Charlotte Blevin’s, (Lia’s great, great, great grandmother) grandfather died during the Civil War. Her parents dreamed of having a large family with a dozen unadopted children. But her parents refuse to listen to anyone about the evil spirits that haunts Graymoss. Lia gives her all to find out who or what the spirits wants even when she is scared to death. In the end, she solves …show more content…
Plot contains flashbacks, conflicts, foreshadowing, and a resolution or denouement. Again, Lia shows ambition throughout the plot in varies ways to solve problems to get the Graymoss evil spirit vanquishes. In the plot with this novel I first read about a flashback to when Lia read her great great great grandmother Charlotte’s diary, to understand how Graymoss became haunted. “When Grandfather isn’t nearby Mr. Slade is mean to the workers” (Nixon pg 25). When Lia reads this in her diary, she is immediately shocked that he has done that but Charlotte’s grandfather need help. With this information that Lia received from Charlotte in her diary, she can further long her invagitation into Graymoss.The next step in plot in this story is the conflicts between Lia and her mother with Graymoss. Her mother, Anne, wants to make Graymoss into a big family with adopted kids but Lia does not want it to happen because of the evil spirits. [Lia says “A big family in a haunted house,” as well as her mother saying, “ ... Charlotte’s writings found a receptive audience in you. You want the house to be unlivable.” Lia says, “No, I don’t. Well, yes, I do. I mean--”] (Nixon pg 46). Lia and her mother go back and forth with having extra kids in the haunt Graymoss. At about three fours in, Lia changed her mind and seen the point of her mom’s view to save Graymoss. In spite of the conflicts in this book, there is also one very good …show more content…
Characterization include how the author general reveals the character’s personality. One of Lia’s qualities she developed was the ambition to continue forward to achieve in Graymoss’s purification. Even though her parents did not believe in ghost, she kept wanting to prove how brave she was and to actual figure out the mystery to bestow away the evil spirit of Mr. Slade. “But I didn’t laugh. I’d just given myself the job of getting rid of whoever was haunting Graymoss, and I didn’t know how I was going to do it” (Nixon pg 135). She took what was given to her by words for mostly everyone including her parents into action by planning and taking specific steps to achieve her goal. Eventually before you could complete her task in hand, she got scary and was about to leave Graymoss. The suspense that the reader experience was about the same as Lia felt when the voices and cold chills gets her. “The wind pushed against her, like it was guiding her to the right direction but the voices all around kept bugging her and was about to drive her mad enough to escape to her real world. You can’t stop me. Lia said with her running to the basement door with all her force to open it” (Nixon pg 181). With including some additional information to sum up what Lia was doing, she obviously didn’t stop and tried to make herself big and using distractions to
What is horror? Webster's Collegiate Dictionary gives the primary definition of horror as "a painful and intense fear, dread, or dismay." It stands to reason then that "horror fiction" is fiction that elicits those emotions in the reader. An example of a horror film is "The Shining", directed by Stanley Kubrick. Stanley Kubrick was a well-known director, producer, writer and cinematographer. His films comprised of unique, qualitative scenes that are still memorable but one iconic film in his collection of work is The Shining. Many would disagree and say that The Shining was not his best work and he could have done better yet, there are still those who would say otherwise. This film was not meant to be a “scary pop-up” terror film but
The Haunting of Hill House is considered a classic to many people. It has a certain sense of feeling missing from today's novels. The Haunting of Hill House has suspense, horror, a little bit of romance, and an ending that will leave you thinking for days. Shirley Jackson is well known for her twisted work. At the beginning of the book, you our introduced to a character that has a major impact on all of its "guests". Hill House. "Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within." This is just one of the chilling sentences from the opening paragraph. The fear begins to set in. Shortly after, you are introduced to the strong yet cautious Dr. John
Dr. Gabor Mate, a Hungarian born Canadian physician, who is also a neurologist, psychiatrist, and psychologist, but who specializes in the study and treatment of addiction, reveals revolutionary evidence pertaining to addiction. In Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Dr. Mate worked with patients suffering chronic drug addiction for 12 years. With 20 years of experience as a family practitioner, Dr. Mate is a renowned speaker and teacher throughout North America; sharing his extensive knowledge with diverse audiences including health care professionals and educators (Mate, About Dr. Mate, 2016). The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Dr. Mate’s most recent best-selling book, illuminates the origins and causes of addiction. As Co-founder of Compassion for Addiction (a non-profit organization), Dr. Gabor Mate encourages a greater understanding; “addiction is the attempt of affected human beings to escape a profound discomfort with themselves and their world” (Mate, Compassion4Addiction, 2015). Drawing on cutting-edge science, Dr. Mate presents the world with a shocking discovery: “The source of addiction is not to be found in genes, but in the early childhood environment.” Therefore, Dr. Mate simply “calls for a more compassionate approach toward the addict.” (Mate, 2016) As cutting-edge science concludes addiction to be a mental health issue, rather than criminal behavior, the American legal system demonstrates a devastating disservice to its own society.
In “The Haunting of Hill House”, Jackson uses a third person point of view in order to create an ambiguous feeling during the supernatural experiences which leads to confusion of weather the novel falls under the sub-genre female gothic, or not. Jackson starts the novel with a very powerful quote: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” (1). That famously known quote is indeed very ambiguous, that evokes suspense. The sub-genre female gothic conventions consist of an old haunted house, mystery and suspense, supernatural experiences, women distress during a transition to adulthood or motherhood, repressed emotions, an aspect of feminism, heroic male figure, dark, and horror. The Haunting of Hill House consists of some of the female gothic conventions but lacks some too.
The war on drugs has been around for a very long time. For some people taking drugs is part of their lives and it is the only thing that gets them through their day. Some drugs are legal and some are illegal but each drug is used in some form of way. People with addiction to drugs fight their own war to either get help that they always wanted or finding drugs to help them stay high. The book Chasing The Scream by Johann Hari is about people's history on drugs and how they got addicted to it or how they recovered from it. Harri gets personal stories from each individual he meets about their struggles with drugs and the journey they went through to get to where they are today. He also talks about theories on how to end the war on drugs and how
The Winchester house is one of the oddest and one of most haunted houses in the world. It is located in northern California. It cost over $20,000,000 to make. The owner, Mrs. Winchester, was rich because her family made the Winchester repeating rifle known as “The gun that won the west”. The house has 160 rooms and there are spirits in each room. The builders had to keep remaking rooms that if Mrs. Winchester kept them all she would have 600 rooms. So when they were done with the house, which took over 30 years to make, there were stairs that led to the ceiling and doors that led to walls.
Characterization is how the characters in the text are viewed and developed as the text expands. For this, I will consider the character, Nyla (purple). Nyla is an innocent girl with dull eyes and voice. Her innocence is revealed as tells of her first time sex encounter and also in her lack of understanding of her mum and sister’s relationship. Her confession of sex to an older man is like that of a young misled child. She is ignorant of the world and its dangers. She just completed high school and is very excited, happy to lose her virginity to childhood sweetheart. Reality drowns on her when she finds out she is pregnant and needed to abort. Her innocence gives her away when she tries to
The tales of haunted houses is a long held genre in American Gothic literature. The haunted houses are usually described as South plantations homes. When the houses were in their prime, they were the best of the best. They represented the upper echelons of society, where only the super rich could own. The dark secret behind such plantation houses is that they were usually build and maintained by slavery. As time pasted and the Emancipation Proclamation was passed at the end of the American Civil War, slavery ended and the plantation homes fell into ruin. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892, short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” while the story does not take place in a typical haunted plantation house, it does take place in a vacation home
A number of strange incidents occur throughout the story. Jack finds a wasps' nest while maintaining the roof, uses an appropriate wasp bomb on it, and puts it in Danny's room. That night, although Jack had checked there were no wasps still in the nest, Danny is stung several times, and when Jack manages to put a bowl over the nest, there are many wasps trapped inside. Then in an almost hypnotic fit after spending too much time going through the hotel's papers in the boiler room, Jack smashes the radio, effectively cutting them off from the rest of the world as snow has fallen heavily, and reaching the nearest town has become impossible except by snowmobile.
A horrible epiphany of the truth about the plantation strikes the grandmother which then leads her family and herself to a mishap. It is significant that the story reveals how nowadays, circumstances are getting worse because before, everything was fine and this produces a positive effect to the young characters such as the grandchildren. Having said that, this is also the reason why they get into a misadventure where they encounter their vicious murderers.
Television today serves as a method to confront our societal fears in a comfortable setting, like books and oral tales did hundreds of years ago. The film The Shining directed by Stanley Kubrick, although a modern medium, still draws from the original gothic novel. Compared to The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, The Shining plays on the same classic and applicable anxiety of finding terror within the nuclear family. Kubrick uses the gothic theme to address horror originating from family relationships, additionally taking the idea of “the gothic novel” to a heightened level through invoking despair in his audience rather than hope as Walpole did in his novel. Despair in The Shining is conveyed by
This book, truly stimulating and electrifying, takes place in the mysterious and little town of Wolf Hollow. The centre of attention and the main attraction in this book is indeed the main character Cameron Weaver. A few other subjects of attention include Cameron's Mother and her Lover boy! Aka C.B., or cowboy boots to Cameron, but really Ken! Although these three persona's are the principal figures in the book, there must always be a bad guy, and that guy is Cameron's, supposed to be forgotten, yet always in mind, father. Cameron and his clingy Mother are always on the run from the horrific situation. Although, one thing is for sure, Cameron is not to call or be in contact with his father. Cameron and his mother are once again are forced
High upon a lonely hill surrounded by a great dark forest, stood an ancient, crumbling manor, known as the Haunted House. The windows were all smashed and it looked like the house was used a long time ago and was never used again. The font gates were as old as the hills. It belonged to a greedy old man, he was as short as a stump, he was really grumpy and fat who everyone said he was a wizard. Even though he owned the immense haunted house he didn’t dare to go inside because he was frightened like a child in dark, so he lived in the small cottage in the grounds of the manor, with just his black cat for company. He was as lonely as the master who has go to war, but hews happy, because he had a true love. His true love was gold, and he had
Adrian Flynn’s playwright “The Valley of the Fear”, adapted from the novel by Conan Doyle, demonstrates how the writer uses techniques to convey an impression of suspense and mystery through scenes with a high level of anticipation and uncertainty. Suspense is achieved through the use of literary devices and events that stimulate the viewer’s moods. Readers wait with anticipation for the next secret to be revealed in strong, sudden scenes. Furthermore, Doyle creates a sense of tension by never giving the reader an entire answer so they can make up their own mind about what’s happening.
Exhausted and beat, Kai grasps his face. The prominent slap that the girl he saved has left a mark. The battle that left one town saved and a hero in pain. His shoulder gashed deeply, a painful memory of the dragon’s last attack before being dismantled and left headless. Kai stands in distraught his right-hand holding his left shoulder and his left hand grasping his face. He watches as the girl he saved stampedes off with steam coming from her ears as her ass imprinted with a bloodied hand, the hand print that Kai had accidentally left. Kai stands within the beloved town just staring at his hand wondering if something was actually wrong. The silence is broken as his companions join him. Even before he can say anything Amber, the girl