The Brooklyn Rail

When Richard Scott Larson was twelve going on thirteen, he started having a recurring nightmare of travelling a hallway full of dangerous, distorted characters toward a door slightly ajar, with someone hidden just behind it in the shadows. To anyone versed in dream language, The Long Hallway will be discomfitingly familiar, yet it is impossible to prepare for the way that Larson describes, in this vivid and cinematic memoir debut, the summer that defined his life.

Like many queer boys and men, Larson was raised with the expectation of being straight, so he had a secret to hide. He describes his sexuality as a “monster inside of me pressing hard against my skin and trying to wriggle its way out.” Of his father, Larson writes, “I thought he would be able to see it in my face, like film projected onto a blank screen, everything I kept hidden in my mind playing out in plain sight.” His father tells him he’ll find a girl one day, and he turns out to be right. “I didn’t know yet that she would be a dead girl.” This is one of many presentiments that give this memoir its horror edge.

Young Larson is himself a lurker, lusting after the older boys in the neighborhood. “I cataloged every inch of their exposed skin with my eyes, my mind building a careful archive of their changing bodies.” Describing a scene where he peeps on one of them having sex in a backyard, he writes that “the shock of witnessing his orgasm was like a crack opening up in the earth beneath my feet.” Over the course of several indiscretions, Larson is found out and consequently chased, called names, and threatened. In this book about looking, Larson is ever aware of being watched, yet completely misses one of the primary lookers: his younger brother who sees and internalizes everything.

What sets up this panopticon is the film Halloween, the 1978 slasher classic by John Carpenter and Debra Hill, which the author obsesses over from his very first viewing. Michael Myers—the film’s villain—spies on the unsuspecting residents of Haddonfield and kills them one-by-one. The town is a nondescript bedroom community, and it feels significant that Larson never names the Missouri town he himself is from, making its interchangeability the point. What Springfield is to the Simpsons, Haddonfield is to a nation of rural queers who relate to the horror genre for how perspicaciously it describes their lives.

What makes that summer a crucible for Larson is not just his acting out voyeuristic desire, but a series of other events that, taken together, connect to form a plot to tear him apart. Larson writes movingly about his gradual estrangement from his alcoholic father until his death. His friend T is raped and murdered, which casts a pall over school and family life for everyone in town. “I knew that T hadn’t asked for any of what happened to her, and I wished more than anything I’d been there instead of her,” he writes. Meanwhile, his mother’s boyfriends engage in stalker behavior. For Larson, this is all Halloween come to life, fusing forever in his mind the links between horror and desire, sex and death.

As Larson’s sexual frustration builds, and with it his anger and erratic behavior, he comes to identify with Halloween’s villain more than anyone else. Early in the film, Myers escapes from an asylum, and Larson can relate. “I was having my own escape fantasies at the time. I wanted to become someone else, to carve out a new identity for myself.” He observes that “Michael has only been doing what felt natural to him at the time, following his newly discovered desire to its inevitable conclusion,” and that “the opening of Halloween is a coming-out story.” Yet Larson knows that you can be both hunter and hunted at once. “I wanted to be something that someone desired so badly that he would kill to get it,” he writes, further vocalizing a death drive borne of a traumatic time for him.

Within the same month that all this occurs, Larson is abused by a sexual predator. As is the case with many survivors, the young Larson blames himself. “What I had thought was only a secret desire had been visible on my body all along to those who knew how to look.” It would make sense that in the panopticon, Larson would then fear that “everyone would see that I’d been marked and forever changed,” the kind of shame that keeps harmful secrets buried. In a denouement as beautiful and poignant as any other scene in the book, an older Larson untangles the past with his mother, who happens to find Halloween playing on a late-night channel. If he doesn’t leave with all the answers he needs, seeing the film again brings him new insight into his life.

One can draw many lessons from The Long Hallway: that desire is inevitable, looking is dangerous, we become what we fear, and bogeymen are ubiquitous. Although Larson writes that “we can leave behind no map for those who step into the shadows after us,” his deftness at showing the prism of interiority, his forensic sense of detail, and his way of writing into the incomprehensible are what make this gem of a memoir the only way out of Haddonfield.