Dark Passages: Summer of Night

Cue the Alice Cooper music: school's out for summer.  But one book about a haunted school is required summer reading for every horror fan in the Macabre Republic.  Dan Simmons's hefty 1991 novel Summer of Night is indebted to Stephen King's It, but its opening (quoted below) deliberately echoes Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.  Also, in the third paragraph of this dark passage, notice how Simmons Gothicizes the school building, trans-forming it into the equivalent of a looming mansion.  The central sentence in that paragraph (describing the school's facade) is appropriately labyrinthine, conveying ornate detail via antiquated diction.  All in all, an engrossing start to an unforgettable narrative:

Old Central School still stood upright, holding its secrets and silences firmly within.  Eighty-four years of chalkdust floated in the rare shafts of sunlight inside while the memories of more than eight decades of varnishings rose from the dark stairs and floors to tinge the trapped air with the mahogany scent of coffins.  The walls of Old Central were so thick that they seemed to absorb sounds while the tall windows, their glass warped and distorted by age and gravity, tinted the air with a sepia tiredness.

Time moved more slowly in Old Central, if at all.  Footsteps echoed along corridors and up stairwells, but the sound seemed muted and out of synch with any motion amidst the shadows.

[...] Visitors to the small town of Elm Haven who left the Hard Road and wandered the two blocks necessary to see Old Central frequently mistook the building for an oversized courthouse or some misplaced county building bloated by hubris to absurd dimensions.  After all, what function in this decaying town of eighteen hundred people could demand this huge three-story building sitting in a block all its own?  Then the travelers would see the playground equipment and realize they were looking at a school.  A bizarre school: its ornate bronze and copper belfry gone green with verdigris atop its black, steep-pitched roof more than fifty feet above the ground; its Richardsonian Romanesque stone arches curling like serpents above twelve-foot tall windows suggesting some absurd hybrid between cathedral and school; its Chateau-esque, gabled roof dormers peering out above third-story eaves; its odd volutes looking like scroll-works turned to stone above recessed doors and blind-looking windows; and, striking the viewer most disturbingly, its massive, misplaced, and somehow ominous size.  Old Central, with its three rows of windows rising four stories, its overhanging eaves and gabled dormers, its hipped roof and scabrous belfry, seemed much too large a school for such a modest town.  (7-8)

Work Cited

Simmons, Dan.  Summer of Night.  New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1991.