Not Necessarily a Vacation from Ordinary Horror

By June Pulliam

05/31/2005

Little, Bentley. The Resort. New York: Signet, 2004. 390 p. 

Bentley Little is the horror writer whose work most closely approaches the embodiment of what Sigmund Freud described as the uncanny. Of course, Freud's idea of the uncanny is generally applied by literary critics to analyze ghost stories, since it explores that phenomenon where we see something familiar in a totally new and disturbing way, as if we were encountering it for the first time. Momentarily, the well known appears altered, loathsome and strange, yet distressingly familiar all the same. Freud describes having one such experience himself when he saw across a dark room the visage of a horrible old man, which turned out to be his own reflection in a mirror.

This feeling is an apt tool for understanding Bentley Little's novels, for he writes about much more than what merely scares us or our collective cultural anxieties. Instead, he writes of how the banal and seemingly inoffensive possess an aspect of absolute evil. This impulse is best represented in The Store, The Mailman, The Ignored, The Association and The Policy, where commonplace people and institutions such as Wal-Mart, the U. S. Postal Service, the insurance industry, neighborhood associations and average white men have sinister dimensions. The Store is particularly notable in this regard with its representation of a huge, soul-sucking global corporation similar to Wal-Mart in its ubiquity. Beneath the smiley faces, low, low prices and wide variety is a demonic force bent on manipulating our deepest desires until we lose our autonomy and allow it to achieve global domination. This is Bentley Little at his best.

Alas, The Resort is not Bentley Little at his best.  It is founded upon a worthy concept: that of a luxurious resort whose mission is to cater to its clients' every whim, only to reveal the hollowness of their own desires. The creation of this resort too is in line with Freud's idea of the uncanny, as the blood and mayhem that are part of the Reata can be traced back to one man, whose insatiable desire for land belonging to Native Americans is indistinguishable from that of the other white people who founded this country. Normally people like Lowell and Rachel Thurman would never be able to afford a family vacation at the Reata, a luxurious resort , but since summer is the off season for vacation spots in the middle of the Arizona desert, they are able to receive a 75% discount. But early on, strange things happen to the family. They return to their room on the first evening only to discover a strange man squatting there, laboring under the illusion that this is his room, in spite of it being filled with the Thurman's possessions. Angry at being forced to vacate, the strange man steals a pair of Rachael's panties. As the weekend wears on, guests begin to disappear, wild parties are held in rooms that the management swears are empty, and the Thurman's sons believe they see a body wedged in the bottom of the artificial waterfall in the swimming pool. The Reata is almost a cross between the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King's The Shining and the ghostly hotel in the Eagle's "Hotel California." The Thurman children go exploring, and against the instructions found on the grounds, wander off the regular path. There they find an old resort that appears to be full of people from another time engaged in decadent and carnal behavior. But when the boys come closer, the guests disappear. Later, after encounters with drunken people and a sadistic activities coordinator who goads guests in to participating in games where the object is to humiliate and maim the opposing team, Lowell decides his family has had enough and decides to leave. But like the "Hotel California," you can check out but you can never leave.  The Thurman's car mysteriously stops functioning, and it is difficult to get a tow truck to come to their remote location let alone find a mechanic to diagnose the problem, so they're stuck. Eventually, it becomes clear that some strange force animates the Reata and its employees, and the Thurman's have no choice but to remain there and fight.

But The Resort ultimately fails as the institution it represents is not sufficiently recognizable to readers. It's obvious that The Store is about Wal-Mart. However, the Reata has no real-world referential. Instead, there are a good many resorts all over the world that offer fine dining, leisure activities that appeal to members of the privileged class, and spa treatments, but these things don't loom sinister in the popular imagination since they aren't sufficiently uniform and most people don't have experience with such institutions. At any rate, they aren't marketed to us relentlessly the way a place like Disneyland is hawked as the happiest place on earth. In fact, Disneyland would have made more fitting subject matter for this novel, since it is more recognizable. Perhaps not as many people visit Disneyland as they do Wal-Mart, but everyone with a television set knows about this place, and is supposed to aspire to take children there.

Like Wal-Mart, Disneyland would hardly require much parody. Some Disney facts: They only let one character appear at one location at a time to foster the illusion that the characters are in fact real, not just some poor bastard in a costume. Characters do not wander around Disneyland if they're making a movie at the time, again to help foster the illusion that the characters are real. Disney will not hire people to play one of the characters who are human or humanoid (such as Cinderella, Belle, or Ariel) if they have pierced ears, or hair that has ever been dyed or permed. And this may be FOAF lore, but I heard that someone's mother got kicked out of Disneyland for talking about the Holocaust to her companion, which had the potential to bum out those around her. 

Because the Reata isn't recognizable to us in this way, as a familiar place that is so cheerful that it has to have some sort of sinister undertone, it cannot be uncanny. Instead, The Resort is merely a novel about a vacation spot where the employees and ultimately the guests seem to be animated by some dark force.