0:08
Pandemics, Zombies, Haunted Houses: 6 Novels That Invert Horror Tropes
There’s something comforting about diving into a book that really doubles down on a trope, providing something so familiar that even if it’s frightening, there’s a sense that you got this, and you have the armor and the tools to survive to the end. It’s why we often return to certain books, films, and video games that wouldn’t ever really qualify as “feel good.”
Just as often we look for a unique spin, or inversion of a familiar trope, one that offers something fascinating and even a little dangerous. That’s what I ended trying to do with Brokeula: It takes the vampire trope and flips it, inspecting the perils of capitalism from the guise of a broke-ass vampire, one completely unlike most vampires who tend to have no issues whatsoever with finances.
There are tons of books that spin a trope in a surprisingly unique way. Here are a few great examples of trope inversions across the years, and in some cases, decades.
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Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
We all know the zombie trope well, and more so the whole zombie apocalypse that so often goes hand-in-hand with our favorite, shuffling post-human creatures. Isaac Marion took the trope and spun it into an empathic tale where the zombie may still be dead but now, they have the capacity of experiencing human feeling and memory.
Protagonist R is shuffling around like a zombie does until he bites into the brains of someone who has memories of a first love, Julie. Soon R is falling for Julie too, and in continuing his interest in all-things human, he manages to regain some of the humanity thought long gone.
Warm Bodies is at once a tale of love and loss, but also a great use of the zombie trope to explore the philosophical plight of the living dead.
Virginia Feito, Victorian Psycho
Ah the killer/serial killer trope. It almost always involves a lot of gore and a trail of murders. Though Victorian Psycho is certainly full of both, it is also a refreshing take on the serial killer story.
Winifred Notty arrives at the Ensor House for Christmas, unassuming in her arrival and primed to uphold her status as governess. Of course, she has arrived with her own intentions and her own secrets that quickly turn the moment into a wild madcap ride that redefines the killer trope to a darkly comedic and transgressive effect. Forget Hannibal Lector or Patrick Batemen: Winifred Notty has entered the chat.
Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock
Though most will recognize this title from both the 1975 film adaptation and the 2018 television series, Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is a novel published in the 1960s and was unlike anything else. One day students from the Appleyard College for Young Ladies decide to make the most of the beautiful sunny day and have a picnic up at Hanging Rock…only they never returned.
The book proceeds to explore the ripple effects of the disappearance so convincingly it was (and still is) often read as true crime.
Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go in the Dark
The pandemic trope is one that always seems frighteningly timely. In Sequoia Nagamatsu’s marvelous How High We Go in the Dark, the virus spread common of the pandemic narrative is explored in an alarming and refreshing way where we see how human empathy and human resilience can and will outlast across generations.
Nagamatsu inverts the trope so deftly in how he decides to focus on the prismic effect of the passage of time, as they survive and struggle to maintain hope.
Carissa Orlando, The September House
If you happen to end up living in a haunted house, odds are you’re going to want to pick up roots post-haste and peace out. Not the case with Margaret, Carissa Orlando’s protagonist in her addictive and inventive redesign of the haunted house trope, The September House.
Even after her husband leaves, unable to deal with the paranormal activity, Margaret stays. She is not leaving. You cannot even imagine what she gets into, and it’s not just the usual “bump in the night.” The September House is as much fun as it is frightening, and a great spin on a touchstone trope.
Max Brooks, Devolution
Brooks has always approached beloved tropes with a unique spin. His debut, The Zombie Survival Guide, took to the zombie trope with a hilarious and unique How-To structure, and his follow-up, World War Z, further explored the zombie apocalypse concept.
In Devolution, he takes the same propensity to invert and innovate in playful ways with Bigfoot. Devolution is a novel about a community that ends up fighting for life as not one but many Bigfoot (Bigfeet?) decide to take the town.
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5:16
The Organized Arson Fraud Gangs of Old New York
Zucker and Blum
In June 1895, the New York papers featured the sensational news of an “organized gang” who had been setting fires in Manhattan and Brooklyn, netting over $200,000 from insurance companies. The members of this “Firebug Brotherhood” were said to range from the “plain crook to the rich fire fiend.”
Soon arrested was Isaac Zucker, a “prosperous tailor” who lived in a “fine house” with his wife and children in Union Hill, New Jersey. He was said to be the leader of this gang, responsible for burning out stores in New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, and New Jersey. It turned out, however, that Zucker had acted almost entirely alone over a twenty-year period in setting fire to his homes and places of business in Philadelphia, Newark, and New York to collect insurance money.
Isaac Zucker (ca. 1846–1915?) immigrated to the United States from Russia around 1870, settling in New York. For the first decade after his arrival he sold cutlery, crockery, and hardware, then had a stand in a market selling tea. He amassed enough capital from this to move to Newark, where he opened a boot and shoe factory and then opened a second factory and store in Philadelphia, both employing twenty to twenty-five workers.
After selling those enterprises, in the early 1880s he returned to New York City, where he manufactured women’s and children’s cloaks. This was also a good-sized operation, employing between twenty-five and seventy workers, depending on the season. Though Zucker followed the common Jewish economic trajectory at this time from peddler to store owner (and then, for some, to factory owner), he discovered that there was an even more lucrative means of income through arson.
In 1895 Zucker was charged for a fire he had set three years earlier in his store and in the apartment next door. When the building did not burn down as Zucker had hoped, he came back a few days later to pull down some of the chimney and walls before the adjuster for the fire insurance company arrived. His trial also revealed that he was associated with at least a half dozen previous fires: one in his New York home, one in his Newark shoe store, two in his Philadelphia shoe store, an-other in his Brooklyn cloak store, and one in a recently opened Newark cloak store.
All these fires resulted in payouts from his fire insurance policies. Following some of these fires he held onto the burnt stock and then transported it to the next location he torched, as proof of his loss. Zucker was consequently found guilty of first-degree arson and sentenced to thirty-six years imprisonment. He served almost twenty of those years before either being released or, more likely, dying in prison.
Max Blum (ca. 1835–1924), Zucker’s next-door neighbor, was born in Russia. He immigrated to the United States in 1877 and settled in New York, where he worked as a peddler. In 1886 he had been sentenced to four years in prison for setting fire to a clothing store in Philadelphia. Since it appeared that he had only a secondary role in the fire that Zucker set to his apartment, he went on trial instead for setting a previous fire to a fur store in 1894 and was sentenced to eighteen months at Sing Sing. Upon his release, he stayed clear of prison for the next twenty-five years until his death.
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Torches
The Zucker case also highlighted a second key participant involved in the business of arson: a “torch,” “mechanic,” or brenner (Yiddish for “burner”) who was hired to set fire to the premises. Using a torch had the advantage of providing the storeowner or tenement dweller with an alibi since he could then be conveniently far away from the fire when it took place.
The torch, however, had more use than simply providing an alibi. He was also expected to have some degree of skill in setting the fire. The torch whom Zucker and Blum used was Morris (Jacob) Schoenholz (ca. 1851–1924). He was born in Russia, immigrated in 1872, and settled in New York, where he worked as a peddler (figure 3.4).26 In 1876 he had been sentenced to ten years in prison on a burglary charge. Upon his release, he worked as a presser in a sweat shop and then ran an ex-press business, transporting items with a horse and a covered wagon.
Schoenholz had grown up in the same town with Max Blum, and it was through Blum that he began working for Zucker, transporting burnt stock from one location to another. In addition, between 1890 and 1895, he set a number of fires for Zucker and others, torching tenements and stores. In 1892, having been promised $25, he lit the fire in Zucker’s store.
Schoenholz was sent to Sing Sing prison for forty-eight years for setting a fire in a flat in January 1895. In hopes of reducing his sentence, he agreed to turn state’s evidence and provided the testimony that convicted Zucker.
10:40
5 Mysteries Set in Grand, Intricate Residences
In my new domestic suspense, A Neighbor’s Guide to Murder, Pixie, our troubled Gen Z protagonist, has a peculiar compulsion. Despite having no available funds, she likes to waste estate agents’ time by viewing posh mansion block rentals in the smarter parts of London, dreaming of the improved version of herself who’d live there if only she might catch a break.
Then she moves into Columbia Mansions and discovers the dangerous reality of such gracious living….
Columbia Mansions is loosely based on a grand Edwardian building near the River Thames in West London (recent owners of these £2-million+ apartments include Succession’s Matthew McFadden) and Pixie’s fascination with the form has its origins in my own. Skulking near the building during a research trip, I was invited in by a resident to have a look around.
Let’s just say she struggled to get rid of me—I could have spent all day cooing over those elegant, capacious rooms, the high windows overlooking lush communal gardens, the silver ribbon of river beyond. (Later, that same apartment came on the market, but sadly it was out of my price range….)
Swanky buildings and grand mansions are a staple of fiction, of course, offering a world within a world, a readymade theatre whose cast lurk in their respective quarters alert for their cue. Throw in a hidden door and secret staircase or two and murder feels almost inevitable.
Here are a handful of my favorites…
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Ira Levin, Rosemary’s Baby
‘Old, black and elephantine’, the Bramford is a Gothic building in New York City with a history of witchcraft and murder. Not much, then, to deter Rosemary and Guy from snapping up the lease for Apartment 7E when it becomes unexpectedly available. Soon Guy has fallen under the influence of elderly neighbors the Castevets, while a pregnant Rosemary finds herself increasingly isolated and menaced.
I think most of us know what it is that makes her baby so infamous, but what are the clues that the building itself harbours satanic vibes? Well, the elevator is oak-paneled, the hallways dimly lit, the previous occupant dead—to name but three.
The Bramford was famously modeled on the Dakota, the Upper West Side icon now best known for being the scene of John Lennon’s murder in 1980. In Polanski’s classic adaptation of the novel starring Mia Farrow, the Dakota provides the exterior shots, cementing forevermore the connection between the real and the imagined.
Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Styles Court is a manor house in the fictional village of Styles St Mary in Essex, to the northeast of London. While noted for being the story that introduced Poirot, the book also set the template for the grand country houses we now take for granted in any locked-room mystery worth its salt (other Christies set in manor houses include The Body in the Library and Dead Man’s Folly).
Arriving at the lodge gates, Hastings feels he has “suddenly strayed into another world” and yet less is more for Christie when it comes to architectural detail: it’s “a fine old house,” we’re told, where tea is served under a shady old sycamore and baths taken in a tub with mahogany sides. Its floorplans matter more than its moldings.
It is at Styles that Poirot ends his days in Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. Now a sprawling guest house “badly in need of a coat of paint,” it makes up for in nostalgia— and a new murder mystery—what it lacks in creature comforts.
Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion
Two-hundred-year-old Wyvis Hall in Suffolk is grand enough to have its own lake, woods, stable block and animal cemetery and it is in the latter that human bones are unearthed by current owners Alec and Meg. The discovery sparks an investigation into the events of a decade earlier, when a hedonistic young man called Adam occupied the place, renaming it Ecalpemos (“some place” in reverse). Here, friends and hangers-on collected for a summer of free love, living “like sultans” in the hall’s decaying grandeur, adrift from the rest of the world both physically and morally.
The Georgian gem that is Wyvis Hall “could only be England,” as one of the characters remarks—and uniquely the product of this particular virtuoso’s imagination.
JG Ballard, High-Rise
In the bleak, dystopian High-Rise, Ballard gives us residential architecture as a form of theatre macabre. The unnamed tower block references London brutalist masterpieces like the Barbican and Trellick Tower, its forty floors accommodating a thousand apartments.
15:42
The Blackthorn Women
The snake lay across Ursula Blackthorn’s workshop doorstep, fat and lazy as spilled sin.
She paused, and she was not a woman easily deterred.
Nearly sixty years on this earth had taught her to take what she wanted. The attention of a man she fancied, the run-down family mansion she’d bought for a song, a fair price for the medicines she brewed out of her workshop . . . if she desired it, she claimed it.
Only snakes made her flinch.
Which was unfortunate, because her hometown of Faith Falls, Minnesota, was infamous for an event the locals had come to call “the snakening.” No one could predict when it would strike, but it always started the same way, with an early spring that blew into town hot and jittery. The US Geological Survey would begin to measure unusual Richter readings in the area. Shortly after, tens of thousands of red-lined garters would unravel from a massive ball and writhe up to meet the sun.
The sight and sound were bad, but the smell was worse.
Scientists called the phenomenon “a sporadic emergence from underground hibernacula attributed to anomalous thermoregulatory behavior.” Locals viewed it as an inconvenience that didn’t outweigh the bucolic charm of their river town. The superstitious called it bad luck.
Ursula didn’t believe in luck, but she had a good reason to be wary of the creatures. Her first snakening, when she was just a child, had been the worst day of her life. Something terrible had happened to her father, Charlie Tanager, after sunset. The snake currently lying on her doorstep brought fragments of that night back: a beer glass embossed with a twelve-point buck, the terrible quiet after violence, the way Charlie had looked at her and her mom, his breath rattling in his chest as he roared:
Every time the snakes rise, I’ll be there to steal your power. Your children will pay, and their children, forever down the line. Not one of you Blackthorn witches will find a better man than me. Not one of you can stop me.
Take it back, Charlie Tanager! her mother had screamed. Take that curse back!
Fear carved itself into Ursula’s bones that night, a terror that lingered as she waited for her father to return to seek his vengeance. But years passed, and Charlie Tanager never showed. Then came the next snakening many years later. Her daughters were teenagers. She’d jumped at shadows those awful days, certain she’d spotted her father in a crowd, in passing cars, in the face of every man who looked at Katrine and Jasmine too long.
But then the snakes slithered back into the earth, and not a single Blackthorn had been hurt. Ursula began to think maybe Charlie wasn’t returning, ever. She’d been foolish to waste so much time worrying. That’s when she really started to claim her life. Stopped asking for permission, started taking up space.
That didn’t mean the red-lined garter currently lying on her studio doorstep hadn’t jolted her with a sharp shock of fear, though. She’d been heading out to do some late-night work when she’d spotted it. Her heart was still dancing from the fright.
She glanced over her shoulder at the gorgeous Queen Anne mansion, now totally renovated, then back at the snake all lit up by the blue moon. The garter was the length of her forearm, its glossy black body striped with vivid red and gold. Just a snake, not an omen. You’re being silly, Ursula. This is August. Far too late in the season for the snakes to rise. Charlie’s not coming back.
Still, she was careful to step around it, and she muttered a protection spell as soon as she was inside her workshop. It should have soothed her, but unease continued to cling to her ribs like damp wool. She lit every lamp in the workshop, flooding the place with honey-colored light, then pulled over a chair to reach the high cupboard where she kept tools she rarely had a use for.
She went straight for the obsidian bowl. She filled it with rainwater from the jar by the window, water she’d caught three nights ago, during the tail end of a summer storm. She scattered in crushed rowan berries and a pinch of powdered bone—stag, not human—then dipped in her fingers to ripple the water. Closing her eyes, she began the incantation. The basin vibrated faintly against the workbench as the surface darkened, and the smell of worms and soil rose into the room.
She glanced down at the water, which had become a moving image. There was the town of Faith Falls, framed in twilight, the river glinting like molten pewter. From its banks, a black tide began to swell. Snakes, more than she’d ever seen, their bodies a knotting, writhing mass. The image shifted, closing in on a figure standing among them. Charlie Tanager’s face bloomed out of the murk, grinning with a mouthful of yellow teeth.
His eyes fixed on hers as if the vision was a window.
The whisper came next, sliding from the bowl and into her ear: Every time the snakes rise, I’ll be there.
She staggered back, heart hammering, then hissed a banishment spell.
21:14
Isabella Valeri on Joseph Campbell, Gender, and Charting the Antiheroine’s Journey
I have only ever written anti-heroines as main characters. Many years ago I remember reading several pieces interviewing Gillian Flynn in the wake of critiques of her third novel Gone Girl suggesting it was “misogynistic,” given the rather sinister aspect in which Flynn casts her main character Amy Dunne. Flynn’s responses resonated with me, and solidified my own view that female characters in many dramatic works are outright boring.
One tires of third act reveals that the mysterious talk, dark, and handsome stranger is actually a Count and only heir to a large European estate, and the book’s heroine is therefore destined to marry him and live happily ever after on the family’s French vineyard. There is something deeply unsatisfying about these sorts of dramatic resolutions in that they sap the agency from their female characters, (not to mention making it clear that the author has never lived on a vineyard and does not understand how much work is involved).
Naturally, there are a host of examples on the other extreme as well, and it is equally exasperating to discover mid-book that the female main character in a work is actually an expert markswoman, an accomplished Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, and has a natural immunity to cobra venom to boot. Surely, I have often thought, there must be some mean between the extremes of Cinderella and “Mary Sue?”
But my own biases in this regard predated the Flynn material. While the seeds that eventually germinated into Letters from the Dead, my debut novel, were already well-developed by the time I started reading Flynn, it was the long journey I made from “pantser” to “plotter” when writing my first novel that finally refined my own view of female main characters in dramatic writing.
In trying to explore the nuances of narrative theory I naturally gravitated to Joseph Campbell’s 1949 work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and the concept of the “monomyth”, a template for the “Hero’s Journey” in dramatic writing, a critical structure that has been applied to works as varied as the Epic of Gilgamesh, potentially the oldest surviving written epic, to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, to Star Wars.
As Campbell describes it: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
Dedicated readers of fiction will recognize embedded in the concept a classic three act structure, the “inciting incident”, the appearance of a helpful mentor, and the metaphorical transformation of death and resurrection, followed by an equally metaphorical ascension.
Maureen Murdock, a Jungian psychotherapist, once Campbell’s student and author of the 1990 book “The Heroine’s Journey”, extended the construct to feminine development, highlighting her view that the female journey is far more about an internal struggle women undertake to find harmony between their innate femininity and masculine influences. But her book is intended as a therapeutic work with practical application, not a guide to narrative theory.
For his part, Campbell, acknowledged that his Hero’s Journey concept is a predominantly masculine one, and reportedly suggested that, as women were often the destination of the Hero’s Journey, they had no need to undertake the quest themselves.
Faced with such barriers what was an aspiring author to do? My quandary was complicated further by my early dissatisfaction with trite or overly potent female main characters in drama and thrillers.
Even some of those that did inspire me, for example, Lt. Ellen Louise Ripley from the Alien franchise, Lisbeth Salander, “Stieg” Larsson’s creation from a woman he actually knew for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Beatrix “The Bride” Kiddo, from Kill Bill, Marie Clement from La Femme Nikita, and Lorraine Broughton from David Leitch’s Atomic Blonde, seem to test one’s ability to suspend disbelief as they punch, slice, kick, or flamethrow their way through, what seemed to me at least, intrinsically masculine challenges. At the same time, I realized that, while in essence action stars, those characters that inspired me were often antiheroines.
While my novels certainly have a strong literary fiction feel, quite early on it also seemed to me that any female main character I wanted to (or perhaps needed to) write was far better positioned to navigate herself through a thriller as opposed to other potential genres, and that such a treatment necessarily required viewing them through rather a darker lens. I also came to believe that female main characters that would be forced to navigate nontraditional challenges required of an author a great deal more care in crafting their origins.
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The Road to Exile
I found myself contrasting my own ideas about the narrative arc of an antiheroine against Campbell’s structure.
