Today I welcome a guest post from Orrin Grey, author of Gardinel’s Real Estate, writing about haunted spaces and how Gardinel’s came into existence, for the Halloween 2014 post series.
“An evil old house, the kind some people call haunted, is like an undiscovered country waiting to be explored.”
The Haunting (1963)
I don’t really know where my infatuation with haunted locales began. Was it the Halloween haunted attractions of my youth, some book or movie, or has it always been there, a hole in my heart in the shape of an old, dark house?
Over the years, a lot of influences have shaped my fascination: The movie from whose opening lines I drew the title for this essay and the book upon which it was based; Richard Matheson’s fantastic spiritualist haunted house thriller Hell House, which is still my favorite haunted house tale; dozens of matte paintings of fog-shrouded manors and mountaintop castles in old movies; decaying Hollywood mansions in slightly newer movies; those big spooky houses that women in their nightclothes are always fleeing from on Gothic novel covers; countless hours parked in front of Castlevania games, exploring their labyrinthine castles; Betrayal at House on the Hill, which might be my favorite board game.
Whatever their shape, places play a prominent role in a lot of my favorite horror media, and haunted or spooky places have a special place in my heart. That’s part of the reason I jumped at the opportunity to do Gardinel’s Real Estate when M.S. Corley approached me with the project. Mike Corley was already one of my favorite artists and cover designers, and we’d been online friends for a couple of years when he came up with the idea. The pitch was simple: He’d been drawing spooky houses, and he wanted me to write descriptions of them for a fake real estate pamphlet. He even already had the name “Gardinels” attached, though at the time it was just plural, a reference to the carnivorous houses from the folklore of one of our shared favorite pulp authors, Manly Wade Wellman. (Wellman’s gardinels are sort of plant houses—like a pitcher plant or venus flytrap, but sized for people. For our project we just borrowed the name, but maybe also a bit of the spirit, at least we hope so.)
Mike would draw the houses, and then he’d send them to me and I’d write up a little description of them. I’m the one who came up with the idea of using the Gardinel name as a real estate firm, and who invented our estate agent narrator Cedric Gardinel. Hence, Gardinel’s Real Estate was born.
It’s available right now, just in time for the most haunted of all seasons, in a limited run of 100 signed and handnumbered copies that are selling out fast, so click here to get yours today!
Inside are thirteen houses, each one lovingly rendered and explicitly detailed. After all, Gardinel’s Real Estate caters to a very specialized clientele, and for the “unique” clients who come seeking their “unusual” properties, a haunted history is a selling point! Not all the houses you’ll find in Gardinel’s are haunted in the same sense as The Haunting or Hell House—there are tales of witchcraft, hidden fortunes, demonic portraits, accusations of vampirism, a haunted chair, and several experiments of a “most unusual nature”—but they are all undiscovered countries waiting to be explored. And of course, if Gardinel’s doesn’t have the property that’s right for you, something can surely be arranged… if you have the right collateral.
Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, amateur film scholar, and monster expert who was born on the night before Halloween. He’s the author of Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings and the co-editor (with Silvia MorenoGarcia) of Fungi, an anthology of weird fungal stories. You can visit him online at orringrey.com.