Psychic Kids, page 1 of 4

An impulsive re-read of King’s third published novel, from 1977, which I’m going to follow soon with his more recent sequel, Doctor Sleep. (Which feels like it was published only a couple of years ago, but I see it came out in 2013, and King has no doubt written a score of novels since then.)

Recovering alcoholic and would-be writer Jack Torrance, recently fired from a teaching post after assaulting a pupil who’d slashed his tyres, gets a job (thanks to a much wealthier ex-drinking buddy) as winter caretaker at the remote Overlook Hotel. Perched high in the Colorado mountains and mostly unreachable from late October to April, the Overlook has a murky past, as one of the locals at the nearest town, Sidewinder (forty miles away), muses at one point:

“Murder had been done up there. A bunch of hoods had run the place for a while, and cut-throat businessman had run it for a while, too. And things had been done up at the Overlook that never made the papers, because money had a way of talking.”

To top it all, a previous winter caretaker, Delbert Grady, had slaughtered his wife, two daughters, and then himself. All in all, it’s a nasty brew of bad psychic residue. But, desperate for a job and a chance to make it as a writer, Jack sees it as the perfect opportunity to finish a play he’s working on. Plus, he’ll be completely out of reach of alcohol, so that temptation will be removed. The trouble is, the Overlook is as haunted as Hell itself, and it’s hungry for more souls—most hungry of all for Jack’s five-year-old son Danny, who has a strong telepathic ability, “the shine”.

As a haunted house novel, it builds interestingly on Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House (and perhaps the only reason King didn’t use an epigraph from that novel is he’d already used it for Salem’s Lot). Both King’s and Jackson’s books are about a haunted place whose haunter isn’t so much an individual spook, as a sort of evil consciousness all of its own, a consciousness you can never be sure was ever human, but which certainly wants to collect human souls. In both, there’s a sensitive character particularly vulnerable to both the hauntings and the haunted place’s invitation to be part of it.

King adds a few turns of the screw to Jackson’s idea. First of all, the sensitive character here is a child—and though in some ways this makes Danny more vulnerable to the Overlook than Eleanor is to Hill House, in others it makes him more resilient, as he doesn’t have her sense of hopelessness. Jack, on the other hand, is a mess of weak points for the Overlook to needle at: he has a temper, is haunted by his own father’s alcoholism and violent rages, and is tottering on the edge of a host of failures:

“He had failed as a teacher, a writer, a husband, and a father. He had even failed as a drunk.”

Perhaps the most intriguing difference to Jackson’s haunted house is that the Overlook, of course, is a hotel. And that doesn’t just mean every room holds a potential spook. The luxurious and remote Overlook seems to sum up the dark, oppressive threat of excess wealth and leisure. There’s something inherently sinister, almost evil, about the idle rich—and the Overlook is where the rich go to idle. Its most characteristic haunting is a 1940s-era party, though I don’t think we’re ever told exactly what evil occurred at that event—it’s as though the very air of wealth, idleness, and power are enough. At one point, the hotel’s evil is explicitly likened to money:

“Little by little a force had accrued, as secret and silent as interest in a bank account.”

And its leverage over Jack is in good part down to his poverty—he has no choice but to stick to this job, however supernaturally dangerous it starts to seem, as it’s that or the very real dangers of divorce, joblessness, and a return to alcoholism.

For me, one of the best aspects of the novel that the film (which I’m much more familiar with) all but leaves out, is Jack’s researches into the Overlook’s history. In the basement, piled high with boxes of receipts, old newspapers, and the occasional scrap of juicy history, he finds a scrapbook in which someone has pasted a record of all the dark goings-on at the hotel—those that made it to the papers, anyway. It leads Jack to want to write about the hotel’s history (though this may be just the hotel itself trying to charm him into staying) and he at one point muses that the Overlook “forms an index of the whole post-World War II American character”, rife as it is with the evils of excess riches, misused power and organised crime.

Perhaps disappointingly, perhaps wisely, King doesn’t trace the Overlook’s evil back to a definite origin. (It’s the film that has it being built on a Native American burial ground.) The feel is, rather, that the accumulation of human evils somehow coalesced into something new and far worse—or perhaps attracted some non-human supernatural evil that could take advantage of it all, like the investment banker to all those little deposits of lesser evil. In a way, this aspect of King’s work echoes David Lynch, another American artist who has a real sense of evil, the way it can latch onto and exaggerate human evil, elevating it to a supernatural dimension.

As I’ve said before (in my re-read of IT), I think King’s at his most effective when his supernatural darkness needs human beings to work through—when he unleashes the pure supernatural he can go over the top for my tastes, into realms that are no longer scary. In this book, I think he does that with the topiary animals, who I just can’t find scary. (Perhaps because I keep imagining an attempt at what I think is a hedge squirrel in a road not too far from me, which convinces me that no hedge animal could look as detailed, or expressive, as King makes his.) The other thing about the hedge animals is it opens up the question of, if the Overlook can animate these things, why doesn’t it animate other things inside the hotel itself and simply kill the Torrances that way? Strangle them all with fire-hoses, for instance, or bash their heads in with doors? It’s much better when it needs Jack to do its work for it, and Jack’s slow descent into paranoia and self-justification in the need to murder his family is what makes The Shining so chilling.

King has spoken about how it was only sometime after writing The Shining that he admitted to himself he was an alcoholic, and that some of his darker thoughts went into Jack. But I think a fuller portrait of the author comes through in Jack’s relationship with Danny. As much as King might have been a less exaggerated Jack, inside he’s surely a Danny: the sensitive, intelligent kid trying to deal with an overwhelmingly difficult and dangerous world. (As Dick Hallorann says: “The world’s a hard place, Danny. It don’t care. It don’t hate you and me, but it don’t love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they’re things no one can explain.”)

King famously dislikes Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of the novel, but for me it’s hard not to see and hear Jack Torrance as Jack Nicholas. Kubrick drops some of King’s ideas (and as one of these is the hedge animals, that can’t be all bad), swaps King’s roque mallet for an axe (surely a more sturdy tool, even if the roque mallet comes with associations of idle luxury while the axe is a workman’s tool), and best of all adds those images that linger in the mind: the blood gushing from the lift doors, the spooky not-twins-who-look-like-twins, that 70’s carpet pattern. In a way, these images, though they’re not in King’s novel, still fit the spirit of King’s writing, as they’re like the catchphrases and (bracketed thoughts the characters are trying not to think) he peppers his text with. Plus, Kubrick’s film has that 70’s bleakness in its high-contrast film stock, an added element to any supernatural film.

Not the 1961 adaptation of Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, but a 2021 Norwegian film (De uskyldige), which I was drawn to for its bleakly realistic take on a theme I’ve written about in Mewsings before: psychic kids.

The Innocents focuses on Ida, a girl of about eight or nine, whose parents move to a new flat in the sort of complex of apartments I last saw on film in Let the Right One In (which would make an excellent Nordic-supernatural-kids double-bill with this film). Ida’s older sister Anna is profoundly autistic, so cut off from the world that she doesn’t respond when Ida viciously (and casually) pinches her leg. Ida befriends another loner at the apartment complex, Ben, a boy of her own age who shows off a skill he’s been practising: if Ida drops a bottle cap in front on him, he can fling it to the side with his mind. Ida’s impressed; Ben is equally impressed by Ida’s ability to bend her arms slightly backwards. He then shows her a cat he’s befriended, and suggests they take it up several flights of steps and drop it, to see what happens.

Amazingly enough, there’s another child with a mild psychic ability in the same apartment complex. The slightly-younger Aisha can hear some people’s thoughts and talk back to them with her mind. She can’t hear Ida (Ida has, it seems, no psychic ability), but can hear the autistic Anna. More crucially, Anna can hear her, even when they’re apart, and it’s through Aisha that Anna is encouraged to say her first words.

The kids realise their powers get stronger when they’re together. They of course use them to play games, with Ida whispering a word into Anna’s ear and Aisha or Ben “hearing” it the next floor up. But things start to take a darker turn with the already-troubled Ben. Bullied not just by the local older lads but also his own mother, Ben discovers he can make people do things. He gets revenge on a teenage boy who taunted him by controlling a much older man. Then he plays with getting his own back on his mother (who has clearly beaten him — we see unexplained bruises on his body), and, childlike, goes way too far, but perhaps doesn’t care, or can’t admit he does. The children’s powers are all meshed together, though, and an injury to one — or caused by one — can be felt or perceived by the others. Aisha doesn’t like what Ben’s doing, but Ben doesn’t like being told what to do. A confrontation is brewing.

The Innocents is clearly a world apart from that archetypal “psychic kids” film, Disney’s Escape to Witch Mountain (1975). There, apart from some mild peril at the end, the film is mostly about what fun it would be to have psychic powers. Here, it’s about how dangerous psychic powers might be in kids who are neglected or ignored or mistreated enough that they can take a childish pleasure in inflicting pain, or in taking an instant and over-the-top retribution just because they can.

But The Innocents does have a more positive side. Though I’ve seen it described (bizarrely, I think) as a superhero film — presumably, just because there are “super powers” involved — what it most reminded me of was Theodore Sturgeon’s classic novel More Than Human (1953), in which a group of misfits who, individually, would be regarded as physically or mentally disabled, together meld into a super-powered example of the next step in human evolution, “homo gestalt”. In The Innocents, it’s through coming together that these kids’ powers develop.

Their powers aren’t explained at all. Ben’s having worked on the ability to fling bottle tops with his mind just seems to be the product of a lonely boy’s application, driven perhaps by a determination borne of a clearly unhappy home life. It’s the coming together of Ben, Aisha and Anna that flips things from flinging bottle tops to mind control and murder. But The Innocents gets past any accusation that this is a major coincidence — three kids with psychic powers, however mild, happening to come together in the same apartment complex — by a hint, at the end, that psychic abilities aren’t all that rare, they’re just usually too mild (or left un-amplified by isolation) to get noticed. (And presumably such abilities either die out in adulthood, or these kids are that tiny step forward in evolution, in the manner of mutants and Tomorrow People everywhere).

The Innocents does have some scenes which are really hard to watch (particularly involving the poor cat), but overall it’s a low-key, even muted film, with a lot of quiet but meaningful moments that build the tension — which is as much emotional as supernatural, particularly when it comes to seeing how far Ida will side with the increasingly vindictive Ben. Not a casual watch at all, nor perhaps as affecting as Let the Right One In, but a worthwhile slice of subtle Nordic supernatural.

Kate Summerscale has previously written about one of the earliest detective-led crime cases in Britain, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008), but here turns her attention to a different type of investigation, in the world of between-the-wars paranormal research. Her “detective” is Nandor Fodor, a Jewish Hungarian journalist working for the International Institute for Psychical Research in London. As the book opens, he has come under flack from the psychic press for being too unsympathetic to spiritualism to properly investigate the mediums, poltergeists, and other phenomena (including Gef the Talking Mongoose) he’s looked into. Fodor hit back, launching a libel case against Psychic News, not just because his position at the International Institute required him to be impartial, but because he was genuinely open to belief in such things (having had some ghostly experiences as a child). The trouble was, he combined a willingness to believe with the rigour and honesty necessary not to be hoodwinked.

So, when some plausible-sounding and dramatic poltergeist activity at a house in Thornton Heath came up, he leapt at the chance to secure this as an exclusive for the Institute. Les and Alma Fielding were in bed, both under the weather (Les had had all his teeth removed, Alma had kidney trouble) when a glass threw itself across the room and shattered. This was but the first of many objects moving, often violently, in the house over the next few days, which had been witnessed by Alma, Les, their teenage son Don, and their lodger George. Fodor began investigating, and was soon convinced the poltergeist phenomena were genuine. If so, this was the chance he needed to prove he wasn’t simply intent on debunking psychic phenomena — and thereby win his case against the Psychic News and keep his job at the Institute.

Pretty soon, Alma Fielding — around whom the poltergeist activity centred — was paying regular visits to the Institute’s London offices, where she’d be thoroughly body-searched by female staff before entering a séance room and performing a variety of psychic stunts, all the time under the observation of witnesses. At first it was poltergeist phenomena — the sudden appearance of small, random objects, including live mice and an antique necklace, as well as the breakage of tea-cups, chairs suddenly falling over, and so on — but Fodor encouraged her in other directions, too. Alma proved to be a medium, able to go into a trance and let her spirit-guide Bremba talk through her. All the while, Fodor was wary of being tricked, and most of what Alma did smacked as much of stage magic as psychic ability. For instance, Fodor and some others took her on a trip to the seaside, during which they visited Woolworths and Alma tried on a ring at the jewellery counter. She gave it back and they all left the shop. But while walking along the road afterwards, an empty film tin Fodor had given Alma began to rattle, and when they opened it, they found the ring. Fodor wasn’t sure whether to be alarmed they’d just psychically shop-lifted, or amazed at what had happened.

One of the troubles with books about poltergeist phenomena, I find, is they often turn into protracted lists of random objects appearing, breaking, or flying across the room. It was no doubt fascinating, even frightening, to witness, but when read about it becomes tedious. Freud, who read and approved Fodor’s write-up of the Fielding case, nevertheless complained that “Some of the evidential detail was tiresome”, and I can’t help agreeing.

Inevitably, Fodor catches Alma in the act of throwing an object that was meant to be one of her poltergeist’s “apports”. An X-ray taken before a séance session reveals several objects hidden in her underwear. As though to keep one step ahead and remain interesting, Alma began exhibiting scratches on her skin caused by her spirit guide’s pet tiger. She tells Fodor of night visits by a vampire, and shows him the wounds…

The Haunting of Alma Fielding chimes in with some of the themes I’ve been looking at on this blog, though in fiction rather than fact. For instance, stories about psychic kids, in which children with unusual powers are chased, captured or held by unscrupulous scientific types, and studied in a lab, usually in a very dehumanising way. (Eleven in Stranger Things, for instance, or the boy in Stephen King’s The Institute.) Or the similar situation in ghost stories (The Stone Tape, for instance, and at least one episode of The Omega Factor), where investigators lay out every variety of measuring instrument to try and capture a haunting. Both of these situations come together in the real-life investigation of Alma Fielding and her unusual phenomena.

Except that Nandor Fodor is nothing like those ruthless fictional scientists. Whereas, say, the psychic investigator in the 2011 film The Awakening is utterly intent on doing nothing but debunk all the mediums and ghosts she comes across, Fodor is not only all-too-willing to believe, but is capable of more than the black-and-white, imposture-or-not style of thinking you’d expect. When he catches Alma surreptitiously throwing a small gemstone and pretending it was a psychic “apport”, he doesn’t take this as immediate evidence that everything about her case is fake. He knows his “psychic” subjects are unusual people, at the mercy of strange drives, and that they might feel the need to add to their genuine phenomena with bursts of fakery and showmanship:

“In psychical science, one fraudulent act did not invalidate all of a medium’s claims. The transcendent and the tawdry were often united in one psyche.”

Fodor, in fact, is just as fascinated by the new science of psychoanalysis, and brought its ideas to bear on his psychic investigations. He was ready to believe the psychic phenomena he was investigating were real, but was also interested in finding out if they were driven by — and perhaps entirely explained by — the psychology of the people they centred on. He entertained the idea that certain kinds of intense psychological conditions might cause objects to move, break, even appear, without the need of an external “ghost” or poltergeist. Equally, he thought the whole thing could be imposture, but unconscious imposture, so that Alma might, for instance, really believe it was a poltergeist that caused her tea-cup to fling itself across the room, when it was simply herself — her unconscious self — flinging it, as the expression of some psychological drive or process hidden to her.

Fodor comes across, sometimes, as a little boy in wonderland. Confronted by one of Alma’s suddenly-appearing objects, he’s able to appreciate the wonder of what she’s just done, whether it’s a genuinely psychical event or a skilled magic trick she’s doing for his benefit. He is – unlike all those clipboard-wielding scientists who attach electrodes to Eleven and make her try to kill a cat with her mind-powers — genuinely concerned about Alma’s mental and physical health, going to the extent of recruiting her spirit guide, during a séance, to make sure she eats enough. When her experiences turn darker — when she starts telling tales of being visited by a vampire at night — he wonders if his investigation isn’t doing more harm than good, and that it may be uncovering something darker within Alma herself:

“Fodor believed that Alma’s apports and elaborations had stemmed from a feverish wish for change, escape, self-expression, but they had also ushered in unbidden experiences, such as the visits of the incubus and vampire, that were rooted in her past.”

The idea that traumatic memories could be so deeply buried as to be hidden from the conscious mind, yet come out in unusual and even violent ways, was new at the time. But Fodor began to suspect it was tied in with the cases of psychic phenomena he was investigating:

“A ghost was the sign of an unacknowledged horror… There were no words, so there was a haunting.”

Which sounds like it might have been taken from Bessel van der Kolk’s book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score:

“Many traumatized children and adults simply cannot describe what they are feeling because they cannot identify what their physical sensations mean… Traumatic events are almost impossible to put into words.”

Ultimately, Fodor moved to New York, trained as a psychoanalyst, and wrote on the paranormal cases he’d investigated from a psychoanalytical point of view. Because of this, he was brought in as a consultant when Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House was filmed by Robert Wise in 1963, and met Jackson, who told him she’d read his books. And this is another theme I’ve looked at in this blog: the ties between the early classics of modern horror and the discovery of the darker levels of the psyche in the work of early psychoanalysts. Fodor, it seems, was there, dealing with the actual real/not-real thing, and thinking about it in the same terms.

In The Haunting of Alma Fielding, Summerscale ties the rise of poltergeist activity in Britain between the World Wars (and there seems to have been a deluge of it) with growing tensions in Europe. In newspapers of the time, headlines about hauntings ran alongside images of the screaming face of Adolf Hitler on another rant. She also emphasises the intimate aspects of Fodor’s investigation of Alma, how often, for instance, his checking of her body for hidden objects, or the need to hold her hands to be sure she wasn’t throwing things, led to so much physical contact and attention. She also ties poltergeist phenomenon to another aspect of the age, Surrealist art, with its unexpected juxtapositions and inconsequentialities. The spirit world has its trends, too, it seems, and poltergeists, perhaps, were the Modernists of their kind, speaking as they did of trauma and fractured narratives (sudden breakages of objects, sudden eruptions into normality), the banality of modern life (focusing as it does on so many day-to-day objects like tea cups, spoons, plates), the apparent meaninglessness of human life (how all these bizarre breakages, bangs, and crashes ultimately mean nothing, and provide no message), all pointing to something deeply disturbing beneath it all, but unsayable in any other way — like The Waste Land, but written in broken crockery rather than fragments of verse.