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It’s Slade! It’s Spite! Slade or Spite, Spite or Slade.  Which house is it?

Last review was Slade House.  This review is all about The Spite House. 

Who knew there was such a thing as a spite house?  Let me guess, everyone but me, probably. Maybe I was home sick from school watching Green Acres when this lesson was taught, I don’t know.  

So, what is it? A one sentence description from wikipedia will do nicely – “A spite house is a building constructed or substantially modified to irritate neighbors or any party with land stakes”.

Author Johnny Compton writes about such a house. Built a long time ago to spite the operators of an orphanage, it stands clumsily on a cliff and towers over the site of the residential complex. Believing that the operators of the orphanage cheated him out of his land, the builder created this monstrosity to obstruct their view and intimidate them. Several stories tall, crooked in design, it turns out that this house is even more ugly on the inside. It is haunted and in a very malicious way.  

The story begins with a family on the run. We don’t know why Eric Ross has taken his two young daughters on a fugitive’s journey across the states. This mystery persists throughout most of the book, egging the readers to continue on, page by page. We get to know his daughters well. One is a teenager. She is quite protective of her younger sister, as is the father.  Both girls are quite mature for their age. They have to be.

To remain anonymous, Eric can only work jobs that are off the books. Here’s one for him – live inside a haunted house. (Pssst! This would be The Spite House. Betcha didn’t see that coming, ooooooo!). Document any paranormal activity. Report findings to the current owner, a mysterious old lady that seems over obsessed with tracking her vital signs. 

There’s a lot more going on in the story as well. Can’t mention everything now, can I? However, since this blog is not only about reviewing but analyzing as well, I’m going to bring up a couple of things that, perhaps, tread slightly into spoiler territory.  Please note, I said “slightly”; it’s not like I’m going to reveal Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father or anything like that. 

If you’ve read more than a few of my haunted house articles (can you give me a few at least? One? 😀 ), you’ll know that I love haunted houses that have special characteristics. By the broadest definition, throw a few ghosts into a house and..ta da…there you have it – a haunted house.  Those houses are cute and all, but I love me some houses with unique supernatural features.  The houses that feed off of people’s psychic energies, like “Hill House” or “The Overlook Hotel, from, respectively, The Haunting of Hill House and The Shining. Or the house that simply feeds on whatever boring ol’ natural energy you have, such as the house in Burnt Offerings.  How about those houses with portals to arcane worlds?  H.P Lovecraft has “built” a couple of these places. Or the house that is a phantom itself and only appears once every nine years. Hey, this was Slade House from the last review! Oh dear, I can go on. A house that represents and/or reflects the psychological struggles of the occupants, like in The Grip of It. Or a house that reflects social change and the trauma caused by such change – such as The House Next Door.

Wanna know what Spite House does? Well I’ll tell ya. It has the ability to keep a part of an occupant behind.

 Curious Reader of this blog: you mean like an eyelash, a fingernail clipping? You’re not talking about a whole finger or anything like that, are you?). 

Me: I’m talking about a part of their soul! Yes kids, I ain’t lying. 

Curious Reader of this blog: How does that work, exactly?  

Me: You’ll have to read the book for the details. But I’ll just say this, one of the themes of this book is blurred boundaries between the living and the dead. I’m not talking just about ghosts. I’m talking about…ah nevermind, just read the book. 

Another thing I like is when haunted house stories feature a certain uncanniness about a  physical feature within that house.  I have labeled these the “agents of the scare” in past articles. The child’s bedroom closet in the movie Poltergeist is an example of this. In the book The Little Stranger there is the tube, a 19th century tube communication device to call out to other rooms on other levels of the house.  In The Spite House, there is a bridge of sorts connecting two different structures. Scary things happen on this bridge. There might be ghosts there…or worse!

All in all, this is a good book. However, it comes to completion with several loose ends. I don’t know if Author Compton intends to write a sequel or not. As is, I was left with a mental state of “huh?” It doesn’t exactly end in a way that hints at a follow-up either. Perhaps it’s intended for readers to remain mystified over such enigmatic concepts as life and death and any gray areas in between. Humanity has been stumped by such things ever since it first spawned, and alas, I guess we must continue on with our confusion.