House of Stairs

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Love Makes You Evil: Though Abigail starts out as a kind, sweet person, her attraction to Oliver gives him power over her, and ends up just as warped as the others at the end of the novel. They soon discover that the food-dispensing machine will only give them food under certain conditions.

The writing style is not so great, and the plot is -by now- quite outdated: from the mystery (which has already been played out many times with way more interesting variations) to the frankly unnecessary final explanation. Such is the nature of that experiment that the two children who resisted the conditioning were actually regarded as failures. She lived in a “real” house, while the others lived in huge mega-skyscrapers and dined on artificial food. It doesn’t surprise me that in 2000, the American Library Association, with teen participation, chose it as one of the 100 Best Young Adult Books of the last 50 years. What follows is pretty tame by today’s standards, and in my books does not hold a candle to Lord of the Flies; however, it still makes for pure, unadulterated compulsive reading.The menace is felt as Bell climbs the stairs to her room on the top floor, the 104th step creaking as she does so and enters the room, the room with the dangerous window that came down to no more than six inches or so from the floor (page 121). In doing this it highlights mankind’s need to be perceived in a certain way by others, and reminded me of the philosophical quote by Max Weber. The second timeline, narrated from the retrospective, focuses on their past, and in particular on the events leading to that ‘one big event’. And the other three kids are not only severely traumatized, but are still following the programming instilled by the experiment, immediately going into their "dance" routine when they see a traffic light that is too similar to the flashing lights of the food machine. Review: Five orphans, named Lola, Peter, Blossom, Abigail and Oliver, all aged 16, suddenly find themselves in a weird place where there are no walls, floor, rooms or anything normal.

Now that I've settled this part of my childhood, I can continue reading the metafiction of my agegroup. It is always understated, laissez fair events, in which controversial topics are seamlessly woven into the narrative without fanfare or bells going haywire. To find an exit, the five teenagers must learn to deal with the others’ disparate personalities, the lack of privacy and comfort, their clear helplessness, and a machine that only feeds them under increasingly ominous situations.

So I would think about this book from time to time for the next 18 years, despairingly, and then I was reading a review of The Hunger Games in the New Yorker, and Laura Miller gave a quick summary of the genre of YA distopic sci-fi, and described this book with complete citations! They come about through confusing the two kinds of truth telling: the declaration of opinion and principle and the recounting of history. AC Independent and The Veterans have teamed up on the film adaptation of William Sleator’s cult 1974 science fiction novel “House of Stairs. The first person story is told by Elizabeth partly in present time (that is its 80s setting) and partly back to the time when she first encountered Bell, in the 60s, and their lives connected, in a dark and destructive way.