Building a Nightmare House with 'Pemi Aguda
Book review and analysis of 'Pemi Aguda's short story "The Hollow."
Unlike Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Other Stories short story collection, ‘Pemi Aguda’s Ghostroots is filled with imaginative, horrifying, and thought-provoking stories. But this review isn’t a comparison; it’s an examination of one of Aguda’s short stories in the collection of short stories. The story under the scope is “The Hollow” and how it builds a wonderful examination of a nightmare house—a horror home built out of trauma.
Nightmare houses are objects that can appear across all of fiction, whether it’s horror, romance, or literary fiction. Examples in different forms of media include the novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, the TV show “WandaVision”, and the video game Psychonauts. Nightmare houses often are structures that exist both internally and externally, like in Aguda’s short story “The Hollow,” where an architect is on an assignment at a strange home that feels alive in its stillness. Other features of a nightmare house that come up throughout Aguda’s story and in others are:
· A nightmare house is built with the relics of the people who fear it.
· The nightmare house often becomes one of freedom and security once a person or characters survives the fear and confronts the pain.
· The nightmare house isn’t a willing, living thing that chooses or wants or desires but takes in.
· It is not always a house in a traditional sense but takes on the form of whatever type of domicile the person images as a home.
· No one moves out of the nightmare house but moves away from it.
· Our nightmare houses aren’t always our own or places that we built and in Aguda’s story they also aren’t places we can destroy.
· They often appear in trauma plots or subplots
“What is a house? What do we want from it? What makes it beautiful?” (The Hollow, Aguda, pg. 52)
What works so well in Aguda’s short story is that she not only creates a great example of a nightmare house AND manages to craft an effective and nonreductive trauma plot. One that works as something more than a purely traumatic journey but offers a way away from pain—like how battling the visitors of your worse dreams usually means accepting the terror for what it is and learning to move away from it even though the nightmare house resides within us and can never be left behind. Aguda also makes a bold distinction between a nightmare house and a haunted house.
Through the story, the reader is given interludes showing that the house is more than a house and swallows abusers into its depths. Never have these abusers appeared again in the story as ghosts or specters who taunt and terrorize the occupants of the home, like in a haunted house. A nightmare house doesn’t use the objects, memories, and people that feed it, but torments the person through what is absent, through the memories that haunt survivors.
These interludes that interrupt the main storyline of the architect, Arit, assessing a house for remodeling also act as flashbacks. The flashbacks entail both Arit’s trauma and the trauma that the house has witnessed. Doing this creates a seamless connection between how a nightmare house is built and how a person learns to carry it as both a protector and a tormentor.
One of the best things about Aguda’s story that I’ve mentioned lightly above is that “The Hollow” isn’t just a story of torment and trauma, but one that offers a way out. It answers the question, how do we leave the nightmare house in an exchange shared between Arit and the home owner who has lost her son to the house: “‘It doesn’t work. No fixing, no forgetting.’… “‘I can’t believe that. I have to try. We have to try. Please.’” … “There is no fixing. A collapsed house cannot un-collapse. Rubble is also an objective expression of history. But Arit won’t be its warden. She won’t be stuck.” Aguda shows the main character confronting the memories of her abuse that has shaped and haunted her and taking a conscious step away from the nightmare house—both metaphorically and literally. Arit leaves the house she’s been assessing when she learns of its history of swallowing abusers.
Aguda goes even further and ends the story on this note:
“A house is a pot, a house is a bag, a house is a prison, a house is a supplication, a house is a justification, a house is a child on your back, weighing you down. A house is a house, and you can erase it, wreck it, tear it to the ground. A house is a house, and no, you can never forget, but you can walk away.” (pg. 66)
While reading this closing paragraph over and over again, I couldn’t help but add ‘nightmare’ into it. A nightmare house is a house, and you can erase it, wreck it, tear it to the ground. A nightmare house is a house, and no, you can never forget, but you can walk away.