We spend the evening cocooned in our sleeping bags, headachey and sticky-fingered from sugar. It’s cold enough that frost spangles the window and the heater rattles, so I cave and let the hellcat inside, an act of generosity which she repays by slinking under the bed and hissing every time the mattress creaks. I plug in the Christmas lights and the room goes hazy gold, and I wonder what a stranger would see if they cupped their hands against the glass: the two of us huddled in our hideout like Lost Boys or Boxcar Children, a couple of homeless kids playing a defiant game of house.
Sometime after midnight Jasper switches to a playlist called “peaceful beach waves.” It sounds like static to me, but Jasper’s always wanted to see the ocean. And he will, I swear he will. Maybe I’ll even go with him.
I try to picture it: shoving my clothes in a backpack and driving across the county line, leaving room 12 empty and anonymous behind me. It feels fantastical, unnatural, like a tree dreaming of ripping up its roots and walking down the highway.
Which is stupid because I don’t have roots; I was born in the backseat of Mom’s ’94 Corvette. I remember bugging her when I was little, asking if we were going to stay in the motel forever, if Eden was our new home. I remember the brittle sound of her laugh, the hard line of her jaw when she stopped.Home is just wherever you get stuck.
I wait until Jasper’s breathing rasps into snores before sliding the laptop off his bed. The hellcat gives a perfunctory hiss.
I click in aimless patterns for a while, as if there’s someone watching over my shoulder and I have to prove how little I care. After the third game of Minesweeper I open a private tab and type two words into the search bar:starling house.
The image results are the same as always: mostly birds, vast murmurations hanging in the sky like desaturated auroras, with one or two grainy photos of the Starling House gates, or the historical plaque on the side of the road. Those pictures lead me to a haunted house blog that rates Starling House eight out of ten ghost emojis but doesn’t seem to have much actual information, and the Kentucky State Historical Society, whose website is listed as “coming soon” as of four years ago.
Lower down in the search results there’s an amber daguerreotype of a not-very-pretty girl wearing an old-fashioned wedding dress. A middle-aged man stands beside her with his hand on her shoulder, his hair a colorless gray that might be blond or red. It’s hard to tell, but I think the girl might be leaning very slightly away from him.
My copy ofThe Underlanddoesn’t have author photos, but I know who she is even before I click the link. It’s the wild, abyssal look in her eyes that gives her away, and the ink-stained tips of her fingers.
The photo takes me to the Wiki page for Eden, Kentucky. I scroll through the history section, which gives me the story everybody already knows: the opening of the first mines; the founding of Gravely Power; the Ajax 3850-B, biggest power shovel in the whole world, called “Big Jack” by locals; seventy thousand acres dug up and wrung dry; that one Prine song that everybody still hates;7a few pictures of Big Jack digging its own grave in the eighties, with a huddle of smaller shovels gathered around it like pallbearers.
I remember once when I was hanging around the motel office as a kid, Bev told me about the time her daddy took her up to the top of Big Jack. She said you could see miles and miles in every direction, the whole county laid out like a patchwork quilt. Her face was soft and handsome for a minute, remembering, before she told me to go get the Windex and a roll of paper towels if I didn’t have anything better to do.
E. Starling’s name is linked only once, in the “Notable people” section.
Her page has a little exclamation point at the top advising readers that the article needs additional citations for verification. I read it with something strange and electric running through me, an itch I can’t explain.
I open an empty document and the cursor blinks at me, an invitation in Morse code. I haven’t written anything except résumés and forgeries in eight years—because Jasper deserves more than make-believe, and because even the Lost Boys had to grow up in the end—but tonight I’m tempted. Maybe it’s the memory of Starling House, vast and ruinous against the winter sky. Maybe it’s the bare facts of E. Starling’s life, a dissatisfying arc that could be fixed in fiction. Maybe it’s the damn dreams.
In the end I only permit myself to copy and paste the Wiki page into the document, telling myself it’s research, before shutting the laptop so firmly that Jasper stirs in his sleep.
E. Starling (author)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Eleanor Starling(1851–4 May 1886) was a nineteenth-century American children’s author and illustrator who published under the name of E. Starling. Though initially poorly received, her picture bookThe Underlandenjoyed a twentieth-century revival and is now frequently included in lists of America’s most influential children’s literature.
Biography[edit]
There is no record of Eleanor Starling’s birth.[1]Her first appearance in the historical record is the announcement of her engagement toJohn Peabody Gravely, founder and co-owner ofGravely Bros. Coal & Power Co.(nowGravely Power).[2]The two were married in 1869, but John Gravely died shortly afterward, leaving the company to his surviving brother, Robert Gravely, and the fortune to his wife.
Starling, who never received formal training in art or literature, submitted the manuscript ofThe Underlandto more than thirty publishers. Julius Donohue ofCox & Donohuerecalled receiving a package containing twenty-six illustrations “so amateurish and upsetting” that he hid them in the bottom drawer of his desk and forgot them.[3]Several months later, when his six-year-old daughter begged for “the nightmare book” at bedtime, he realized the pages had been discovered.[3]Cox & Donohue offered Starling a modest contract and publishedThe Underlandin the spring of 1881.
Eleanor Starling never met with her editors or readers. She refused all interviews, and all correspondence addressed to her was returned unopened. She was declared dead in 1886. Her work was held in trust until it fell out of copyright in 1956. Her home in Muhlenberg County is marked by theKentucky State Historical Society.
Critical Reception[edit]
The Underlandwas considered both a critical and commercial failure upon publication. A reviewer for theBoston Timesdescribed it as “deliberately unsettling” and “a transparent theft from Mr. Carroll,”[4]while the Christian Children’s Union petitioned several state governments to ban the book for the promotion of immorality. Donohue defended it in an open letter, asking how a book could be immoral when it contained no nudity, violence, sex, alcohol, or profanity. In response the Children’s Union cited the “horrific anatomy” of the Beasts of Underland and the “general aura of dread.”[5]
The book developed a quiet following over subsequent decades. By the early 1900s a number of artists and writers were citing E. Starling as an early influence.[6]Her artwork, initially dismissed as clumsy and untrained, was lauded for its stark composition and intensity of emotion. Her sparsely told tale, which described a little girl named Nora Lee who fell into “Underland,” was recognized for its engagement with themes of fear, isolation, and monstrosity.
Since thenUnderlandhas gained acclaim as an early work in the neo-Gothic and modernist movements, and is considered a cultural turning point when children’s literature abandoned the strict moral clarity of the nineteenth century for darker, more ambiguous themes.[6]DirectorGuillermo del Torohas praised E. Starling’s work, and thanked her for teaching him that “the purpose of fantasy is not to make the world prettier, but to lay it bare.”[7]
Adaptations and Related Works[edit]
The Underlandwas adapted as a stage play of the same name in 1932 at the Public Theater in New York City, and revived in 1944 and again in 1959. The 1959 production ended after only three nights, and was the subject of aHouse Un-American Activities Committeereport citing its “hostility to American values, traditional family structures, and commerce.”
The Underlandwas produced as a feature film in 1983, but never released. A documentary about the filming of the movie,Unearthing Underland,was nominated for an IDA Award in 2000.
In 2003, the song “Nora Lee & Me” was produced as a hidden track onJosh Ritter’s third studio album,Hello Starling.The bluegrass girl group the Common Wealth also cites the book as an influence on their 2008 alt-country album,follow them down.
