I recently watched a video on the architecture of haunted houses in films and what makes them seem scary. Among the most common elements are: the Mansard roof, enclosed in its coffin-like pitch; the pointed, gothic-looking widow’s walk; and the forced, distorted scale of being placed upon a hill. Like most conventions, these elements have been repeated so frequently that they’ve become a kind of shorthand for what they’re meant to convey. But to go looking for origins, for the first haunted house, would seem to be beside the point.
Yet for us as readers, there are and must be starting places—or at least points of accidental entry. Some of these are lost to us, forgotten; others, we have placed on veritable mantels, reliquarized as the artificial limbs of our own developing selves.
After watching the video, I realized that my own idea of what a haunted house should be was itself possessed by a singular image: Shel Silverstein’s accompanying sketch to the poem “Enter This Deserted House,” which appeared in his iconic Where the Sidewalk Ends. The sketch is in Silverstein’s usual style, a simple pen and ink drawing characterized by a distinctive use of clutter and light. The house is a mix of architectural styles, its sunken gable crowded with the signs of more than one forgotten age. It is less a fallen house of Usher––more a Frankenstein’s monster of the foreclosed and soon-to-be condemned.
On the occasion of its 50th anniversary in 2024, Where the Sidewalk Ends reasserts what for me had become a vanishing frame of reference. If my own parents were to raise me now the way they raised me then, I’m not so sure Where the Sidewalk Ends would even be allowed in the house. Amid its Rabelaisian cast are heads growing out of heads, heads growing out of behinds, plungers for hats, nude vagabonds, and eaten babies. In fact, Silverstein’s characters never stop eating, as in “Hungry Mungry,” “Melinda Mae,” (who over the course of eighty years devours an entire whale) “Boa Constrictor,” “Me-Stew,” “Recipe For a Hippopotamus Sandwich,” “Sleeping Sardines,” “Pancake?,” and still more. Yet somehow, Where the Sidewalk Ends made it past the Southern Baptist defenses I grew up with.
As others have pointed out, there may have been a lag in Silverstein’s acceptance as a children’s author due to his previous work as an illustrator for Playboy. Imagine the kind of panic this career pivot might cause still today. There is something hilariously poignant, though, in Silverstein’s attention to adolescent self-obsession and a seemingly innate desire to accumulate and devour––an aspect of development which he deeply understood as a father himself and which his illustrative style proved uniquely capable of portraying. In the poem, “Fish?,” this theme is drawn out into the political to say that only the biggest fish get fat. “Do you know any folks like that?”
People often talk about how the best children’s stories offer something for the kids and something for the adults. While Silverstein does not always invoke this dual mode, when he does it’s almost always to comedic effect. Who could relate to the exhausted figure in “Shadow Wash” who washes their shadow only for it to shrink, other than someone who also does the laundry? And then, in “What a Day,” the poet collapses this gap completely by adding, “I’m eight years old / And turning grey.”
There are also the more uncanny aspects of rereading a book from one’s childhood. Its contents can conjure a bewildering familiarity, mediated as they are through decades of news headlines, aesthetic trends, political movements, and the reader’s own coming of age. When, for instance, the Guardian ran a story announcing the death of the “world’s dirtiest man” in October 2022, it produced in me a light déjà vu (see: Silverstein’s “The Dirtiest Man in the World”).
Other familiarities are not exactly what they seem as I write now, in the long wake of the pandemic:
Have you heard it’s time for vaccinations?
I think someone put salt in your tea
They’re giving us eleven month vacations
And Florida has sunk into the sea.
Fortunately, flat-earthers have not yet discovered Silverstein’s “The Edge of the World” from which the cover image for the first edition of Where the Sidewalk Ends is taken, where he facetiously declares in the end that “the world is FLAT!” The poem does reveal, however, something true about tone, sarcasm, and good faith reasoning: even a child is capable of detecting rhetorical ironies and their comedic intent.
When Where the Sidewalk Ends was first published in 1974, the Watergate scandal dominated the headlines. Yet for some reason, contextualizing it in this way—the way we might a literary novel—feels a bit like clickbait. Move forward or back, and we are juxtaposingly jolted by the fact that Where the Wild Things Are (1963) was published the same year JFK was assassinated, Matilda (1988), the year the first internet-related computer virus flared, and so on.
Of course, a certain kind of historicizing could and should be done. I’m slow to part with the idea that Where the Sidewalk Ends comments in some way on the state of American cities in the 1970s, when many lived in crumbling infrastructures as a result of a decades-long strategic abandonment undertaken by the state of minority and working-class communities; for the urban poor, the sidewalk really did end. With this history in mind, “Enter This Deserted House” takes on a new dimension. In place of your run-of-the-mill “haunted” house, “deserted” specifies the material preconditions needed for a haunting to take place. Similarly, in “The One Who Stayed,” a strangely sad retelling of the Pied Piper, the speaker laments being left behind by their family, adding: “This town grows old around me.”
Silverstein’s titular poem, while innocently playing into a childlike call to nature, lands on a similarly nostalgic note:
Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk white arrows go
To a place where the sidewalk ends.
Here, Silverstein puts absurdity on pause and gives voice to a more earnest injunction to “opt out.” In this vein, Where the Sidewalk Ends proceeds relentlessly to poke fun at routine interactions and needless, exhaustive productivity in a world swarming with the detritus of accumulating waste, and in doing so, strikes a materialist chord. In these instances, Silverstein’s amassing blots of ink threaten to turn on and consume the hoarding subject. Such is the fate of “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout” who “Would Not Take The Garbage Out”—or, by contrast, the emotionally encumbered “Hector the Collector” whose prized possessions the “silly sightless people” consider to be trash.
It feels increasingly rare to have such a beloved children’s text still exist as just that: a text, a book, without the burden of commercial intervention. Unlike Seuss, Dahl, Potter, and Sendak, Silverstein’s work resists being optioned for the big screen. Perhaps its great sin, from the viewpoint of prospective commercial interests, is a lack of emotional or moral instruction. Certainly, Silverstein’s Rabelaisian cast of characters are simply too disparate. There is just too much white page between them, and all their heads and headgear are too incongruous for a toy line (god forbid). In this respect, Silverstein’s own model for opting out has thus far held strong.
In some ways, Where the Sidewalk Ends is a book concerned with the strangeness of self-reflection. It subtly introduces the idea that how we decide to organize the world is up to our imaginations, and that how we organize our imaginations is up to us. Reading it again, it’s impossible to lose sight of the fact that a hand drew these pictures; that a mind made up these poems. Its value for me now comes not just from its brand of imaginative grotesquery but from the way Silverstein so patiently addresses the reader––the child, on whom almost any allusion would be lost, for whom all literature is novel.
Introductions carry a specific kind of weight. They determine the context in which we proceed and how likely we are to return: a kind of haunting in their own right. If done well, starting places and points of accidental entry bring us in from the misshapen chaos of prosaic life and reorient us to it, sometimes by imperceptible degrees. I remember discovering that by the time I had come to know and love Silverstein’s work, the poet himself was already gone. I remember grieving, in some small way, the fact that there would be no more poems written or illustrated by him. Now that I write poems myself, I’ve been thinking of a line break as where the sidewalk ends. I’ll write out a ledge and teeter there, decide or not to go on.
Ty Holter is the author of the chapbook Extended Stay from Subpress Collective. His work has appeared in Protean, Olney, and Firmament. A teacher and poet, he lives is Western Massachusetts.