The Origin of the Doll House

I looked at Roman, and he simply bent down to inspect the model. Then, without saying a word, he too took up the position in which he was placed within the miniature house. In the meantime, both Miss Gilda and my wife had adjusted their positions. I looked from the dollhouse to the real house and noticed the similarity. But it did not strike me as add, just then, how the two images matched. It is only in hindsight, truly, that the idea becomes terrifying to me.

“Well?” asked my wife. “Do you like it?”

“Yes,” I said. “I rather do. I shall enjoy playing with this-- and the figures are so detailed.”

“We hired a craftsman at the closest village,” explained Miss Gilda. “It was at one of those flea markets that are so interminably open-- I spotted the sign declaring so once night as I drove past.”

“We all went there and posed for the figures, though we had to provide yours by photo to keep the surprise. That craftsmen seemed to intensely devoted to his work, and he murdered as he--”

It was the usual response for our company to notice and comment upon every slip of the tongue. We thought, as a whole, that by catching each mistake we would keep our minds intellectually sharp enough, and playful enough to face the ever-growing challenges of the world. I began to comment upon the mis-pronunciation, expecting that all would join in the gentle ribbing of our companion, but as soon as the words began to form upon my lips, my mistress continued.

“--murmured as he worked. He was one of those eccentric types, county people, that kind that might read about in a book by Mortred Lich.”

We all agreed. Lich’s books were favourites of ours, despite their removal from anything that seemed like it could ever concern us. Mainly, each book was concerned with an old, royal family that had split off from their England manner to make their fortunes on a small, semi-isolate peninsula in Maine. Most of the books were comedies of manners, with some amount of tragedy and pathos surrounding the lives of their inhabitants: the realism and regional accounts captured the hearts of all who joined me in my new home. The most recent of the books, “The House on the Cliff” was a departure from the usually more light hearted, if not sentimental style of Mr. Lich, and delved in something not unlike the Gothic workings of a Bronte or a Walpole.

If I was being truly honest, if uncharitable, I would say that the most recent work-- while well crafted in it’s genre-- was at best derivative. Formulaic. More like the potboiling efforts of a Stephen King or Dean Koontz or any number of best-seller favorites than the well thought out odes and paen to times past. This was no Sarah Orne Jewett narrative, nothing like A Wagner Matinee, the sort of psychological precision we expected from Lich. Instead, the story was rather plain in style. Yes, I have said it was like a Bronte or a Walpole, but not perhaps so much like either that it really bears sustained literary discussion. Except, of course, for the fact that it comes incidentally into the story, and bears some structural similarities.

For example, the “House on the Cliff” started with a newly moneyed millionaire moving into a house-- albeit one cliffside, not in the midst of some moorland landscape-- that retained some mystery, some fascination over the new inhabitants. To this was added, as one might expect, the rather bland suggestion of the ghosts of former lovers: an old master of the house and his mistress. Things in the book came to a quick climax when the ghosts confronted the new owner and tried to turn him into an obsessed maniac, like them. The new owner became convinced of his sanity above the sanity of all other people and began to do away, that is, kill, those people who stood as it seemed in the way of his ambition, which was originally to restore the grandness of the house but became to cleanse the world so that the house would never be tarnished by impurity again. Into this fracas, Lich inserted the also overused elements of two investigators, with a will-they-or-won’t they storyline, the very bland twist being that both of the investigators were females.

As the investigators undertook their search for the reason behind so many disappearances in the little town that was the central setting for the novel, they came up against both the owner of the house and the ghosts. The whole thing, of course, leads to one of the investigators becoming captured, the other one vowing to do anything to affect her potential lover’s safe return, and a climactic showdown where the ghosts are returned to the afterlife. As per usual in these sorts of narratives, this effect occurs because throughout the whole book the investigators, as well as the new owner of the house, become more and more interested and initiated into the mysteries of an apparently long dormant (but in all actuality still thriving) mystery cult. That cult happened to be some literary hodgepodge of Illuminatism, HB of L, and some watered down misunderstanding of Alamutian ideals. The secrets that everyone learns throughout the procession of the book solve the problem, though the new owner of the house is struck dead: even though the magic or spiritual forces at work in the book should have rightly struck dead the captured woman.

Quite lamely, in my opinion, the **** of love supposedly transfers the **** and allows the two partners to reveal their love for each other, and ride off into the sunset, though not without clearly leaving the possibility that there might be a sequel either with the investigators circling back down the well of conspiracy that led them to this point or finding themselves in the midst of an entirely new mystery. The book sold fairly well, so my guess is that we will soon be reading another Lich book in the same vein. If I were to guess, especially given his usual title conventions for series, it will be called something like “The House in the City” or “The House of Secrets”. The idea, and a main theme that ran throughout the whole of the book, was that every house contains a secret. Even a small apartment. There is, he claimed, in perhaps the best prose the book offered, “in the center of every dwelling some small shadow heart, some idea that has taken hold and grasps deep into the fiber of every inhabitant. County houses, with their gardens, have a look and present more than just that look-- when you choose to live in such a place, because it projects an image, you choose to become part and parcel of that image. The same for an apartment, a split-level, some cabin in the woods. Every house, like every novel, has a thematic meaning from the foundations to the very roof.” I must stop my quotation here, for after this he begins to make a rather purple prose comparison of the relationship between those detectives and the building of a house. Ir rather tends to weave on for pages, rather tediously, distracting from the initial and important narrative, like a Matryoshka Doll of a frame story that is convoluted one forgets from which perspective one is looking in on the action.

I had to agree with my mistress, however. From her description of the country carver who made the models, he seemed to be just the sort of genteel, yet somehow earthy yeoman of the typical Lich model. I could not help but run my hands over and over the models. It was hard, even then, for me to tear myself away. But, it being the first night in the house, plus my natal anniversary, I sadly had to let the toy go.