The haunted house formula in American fiction

"The Haunted House Formula in American Fiction" traces the generic roots of such tales to the European gothic tradition as transformed by Edgar Allan Poe in "The Fall of the House of Usher" and Nathaniel Hawthorne in The House of the Seven Gables. These embryonic haunted house tales can be distinguished from traditional ghost stories—as practiced by Henry James and Edith Wharton—by their reduced ambiguity, their focus on the family, and their exclusion of traditional ghosts in favor of a malign and self-conscious house. Perhaps the most conventional expression of this revised formula is Jay Anson's potboiler The Amityville Horror. However, other American writers have exploited the same formula with more sophistication. For Charlotte Perkins Oilman and Shirley Jackson, the haunted house serves as a metaphor for oppressive gender structures in American society. Robert Marasco and Anne Rivers Siddons, on the other hand, employ the haunted house as a metaphor for a corrupt American Dream. In The Shining, perhaps the best-known haunted house tale of the last thirty years, Stephen King extends and refines this critique of the American Dream, while engineering a return to the gothic castle of old.