What is horror? The movie business made millions on horror films that reduced the genre to the on-screen depiction of outlandish monsters. But a handful of literary works have explored an alternative conception of horror—one that resides in our own hearts and minds. When Colonel Kurtz, at a key juncture in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness , shouts out "The horror! The horror!" he isn’t confronting a vampire or werewolf, merely his own personal capitulation to evil. He is the beast, and it dwells within.
Helen Oyeyemi focuses on precisely this kind of terror in her 2009 novel White is for Witching . Here the narrator, a troubled young woman named Miranda Silver, might be haunting herself. She hears voices and sees ghosts, but is this a visitation from the afterlife, or just a sign of psychological turmoil and impending mental collapse?
She resides in a bed-and-breakfast run by her father Luc, and at certain moments the building steps forward as narrator in Oyeyemi’s novel. The house has plans of its own, and they reflect dark, destructive desires. But, here too, Miranda shares some of the guilt—at times she seems like an extension of the haunted house, and it channels its maleficent energies through her. Yet, from another perspective, Miranda is little more than a victim, the plaything of forces beyond her capability to comprehend or control.
Some have compared Helen Oyeyemi to Henry James , and at first glance this seems a strange connection. White is for Witching is an unconventional novel, less a structured story than an extended mood piece, a rumination on horror as personified in a disintegrating personality. Even so, White is for Witching captures some of the characteristic Jamesian ambiguity, the openness to multiple interpretations that has kept literary scholars debating, more than a century after it was written, whether The Turn of the Screw is really a ghost story, or just a metaphorical haunting that reminds us of the dark corners of everyday existence.
This kind of existential dread of the horror within is perfectly suited for realization via the techniques of literary fiction. Even so, only a few authors have plumbed its depths. Women authors have played a significant role in developing this theme, and we can trace its evolution from the Bronte sisters all the way to "The Lottery" ( Susan Jackson ), The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath), and works by contemporary writers such as Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson) and The Orange Eats Creeps (Grace Krilanovich). In these books, horror doesn’t necessarily manifest itself in terms of ghosts and haunted mansions, but might appear in the form of an eating disorder or obsessive-compulsive behavior.
White is for Witching begins with Miranda Silver returning to her home in Dover after a lengthy period of institutionalization. Her mental state is precarious, perhaps even psychotic, and she suffers from pica, a dangerous disorder marked by a craving for non-nutritional objects. In Miranda’s case, she eats chalk. The recent death of her mother Lily has aggravated her compulsions, but after a long stint under medical supervision she is ready to resume normal life. In a moment of atypical ambition, she even applies to Cambridge—although perhaps less because of her academic aspiration and more because her twin brother Eliot is doing the same. Eliot’s application is rejected, but Miranda is accepted, and she now must control her self-destructive impulses, and adapt to the demands of university life.
In the hands of another novelist, this story might have resulted in a triumphal reintegration into society, a returning from the brink for our troubled protagonist. But White is for Witching is not that kind of book. Miranda not only fails to find her way back to normalcy at Cambridge, but even manages to drag her intimate friend Ore into her psychic malaise. Before long, Miranda has returned to her haunted home in Dover, and has even convinced Ore to pay a long visit.
But the evil building is hostile to outsiders. Sometimes it traps people in its confines —in magical areas where they are held captive. The building’s elevator is especially dangerous, always threatening to take people to floors that they never knew existed, and from which they might never return. Miranda is conflicted between loyalty to the house and horror at the danger it represents. Or perhaps I could describe her dilemma as a choice between seeing herself as part of the deadly tradition the home represents, or as a victim that must escape from its clutches.
Readers will probably find this vacillation unsettling, and perhaps ultimately unsatisfying. Even at the conclusion of the novel, they won’t be sure who did what to whom. The plot leaves behind a tangle of loose ends and unresolved conflicts, and some of them were hardly developed before getting abandoned. For example, we learn early in the book that Miranda’s mother died during a violent incident in Haiti, and I kept expecting that the circumstances would be explained. Yet Oyeyemi skips over this, as if were hardly worth discussing—although the mother's death appears to precipitate everything that happens subsequently in the book. The same is true of the incidents that resulted in Miranda’s institutionalization at the start of the novel. The reader is told that Miranda can’t remember what happened in the moments leading up to her collapse, and though we eventually are given a few hints, the sequence of events remains confusing. Again and again, the link between cause and effect is tenuous.
This compression of key incidents that seem loaded with tragedy into a tiny number of facts undercuts the emotional impact of the novel. But the poetic qualities in the book compensate, in some degree, for the looseness in plot and structure. At times, White is for Witching , moves away from the constraints of the novel, and instead operates as a richly imaginative—if slightly feverish—journal. We continue to read on, despite gaps in the narrative that a more conventional author would have filled.
And, to some extent, Oyeyemi earns my praise for infusing even the most outlandish details in this story with a plausible psychological resonance. I may walk away from this book wondering whether it isn’t more a hallucination than a structured narrative. But I could imagine reading accounts of just this sort in collection of psychiatric case studies. And this is more than just the chronicle of a medical condition. It is a legit horror novel. After all, what could be scarier than a ghost story where you can’t escape…because you are the ghost?
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from Basic Books.