“The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.”
Harvey is a ten year old boy, and like many such young boys, he prefers fun and games to rainy days and chores. But it is February, he is bored, and there is no respite in sight.
Until one stormy day, just as Harvey is sure he will simply die if he doesn’t have some fun, his window blows open and a bad-smelling man with a wide, wide grin comes into his room. The man introduced himself as Rictus, and tells Harvey about a wonderful place, an adventure at hand, and offers to see if there is space for Harvey there. The following week, on the way to school, Rictus visits Harvey again, tells him that Mr. Hood’s Holiday House has a room for him after all, and he is free to come and stay for as long as he wants. Harvey accepts.
At first, he only intends to come for the morning, maybe the afternoon. In any case, he figures he’ll be home by dark. But Rictus leads him across town, through a wall of mist, and into a brilliant summer day. There he finds “a house that had surely been first imagined in a dream,” new friends, all manner of delicious food, and a room all his own. He calls his parents, and they encourage him to stay as long as he wants. So Harvey settles into life in the Holiday House, where every morning is a verdant spring, every afternoon a lazy summer, Halloween comes every moonlit evening, and opening a new Christmas present precedes the end of every night.
But not all is well in the house, and strange things start to unnerve Harvey – the cold and lonely lake with its massive, melancholy fishes, a Halloween prank turned sour, the sorrow and fear of old Mrs. Griffin. Harvey’s friend Wendell tries to leave, but can’t make it through the wall of mist. Is it even possible to leave Holiday House? What is the cost of doing so? What is really being stolen from the children, even as they indulge in a world of wonders where every wish seems to come true?
Clive Barker weaves a strange and wonderful tale. The Holiday House is clearly too good to be true, and the strange and uncanny details of the place pile up slowly, inexorably, leading to a sense of dread. Harvey’s battle with the house, a battle of wits and courage, is marvelously told. Harvey is in some ways a typical young boy, but his soul shines brightly, and it is only through his cleverness and determination that he has any chance of stealing back what was taken from him by the Holiday House, and rescuing its other victims in the meantime. Though this story is different from some of Barker’s other, more hard-core horror stories, such as The Hellbound Heart – it is less grim, less horrific, certainly less gory – it is still full of fantastical and eerie wonders. Readers who visit Mr. Hood’s Holiday House will not be disappointed by the mysteries they encounter here.
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