Thursday, September 9, 2021

MYTHCOMICS: "THE HORRIBLE HOUSE" (ADVENTURES INTO TERROR #29, 1954)

 Probably no trope has been as heavily used in horror comics than that of "the biter bit," where some nasty or even merely unpleasant person meets some terrible comeuppance at the hands of some monstrous entity. Most of these stories depend on a fairly simple turnabout, but this 1954 horror-tale from pre-Marvel Atlas has an extra level of complexity to it.




Unlike many such stories, there is no interest in the psychological outlook of the main character, known only as Mister Belding. The unknown author of the story, who may have been the attributed artist Al Eadeh, presents Belding as a man terrified, like many real people of the 1950s, of an impending nuclear holocaust. Belding is also revealed to be a misanthrope, who states on the second page that "I hate people! I've lived alone all my life." There's no authorial interest in how he got that way; only in his colossal ego: "If anybody survives an atom bomb attack, it should be me!" 




When he has a house built far from the cities that will be the logical targets for A-bombs, his builders give him two related warnings. One builder claims that he'll "go crazy with loneliness," but Belding claims to be immune to any need for human companionship. Another builder warns that the remote area is swampy and that it won't bear a proper foundation-- which alone ought to signal to Belding that there's a logical reason why no else lives in the area. But Belding is obsessed both with being alone and isolated from the atom bombs, so he has the house built anyway.




Unfortunately, one night Belding receives a visit from neighbors he didn't know he had. It seems that at some point someone constructed a cemetery on the swampy land, but the graves all sank into the earth and were apparently forgotten by everyone. 



The "gotcha" then transpires, as Belding's house collapses not from nuclear assault but from the instability of the marsh lands, and Belding's refuge becomes just another of the sunken graves. As an added insult to the injury of suffocating to death, Belding's conversation with the specters suggests that he won't just die and lose all his earthly goods, he'll have to put up with the company of other repulsive dead people like himself for eternity-- a hellish fate for a would-be hermit. (Though one might argue that the spectres may be things that Belding is simply imagining as he dies, which would make the tale uncanny in its phenomenality, the story would lose much of its horror if Belding wasn't about to be tormented throughout his afterlife-- and so I judge the story "marvelous.")

The last ironic twist is a character making the risible comment that the house must have sunk in accordance with Belding's wishes: that he built on the land because he wanted an "underground shelter" against the holocaust. This does raise the question as to why Belding didn't simply construct a real bomb shelter in a more dependable place, but the realistic inconsistency is what makes Belding's misanthropic mania mythic in nature. The author is not interested in a psychological study of nuclear apprehension, such as Philip K. Dick produced about a year later in his similarly themed short story "Foster, You're Dead." But in addition to giving the comics-reader his expected "gotcha-grossout," "House" catches much of the same equation between privacy and death found in this famous couplet from Andrew Marvell:

"The grave's a fine and private place,

"But none, I think, do there embrace."




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