The world of teen horror is a scary place, but sometimes it’s even more terrifying to be shut out of that wider world. This exclusion can take multiple forms, from being lost in the woods to social ostracization that leaves these teens on the outside looking in, but sometimes this isolation is intentional, the nefarious plan of a kidnapper looking for power, payback, or a ransom payday. Kidnapping plots and experiences are central to two of Diane Hoh’s Nightmare Hall books, The Coffin and Kidnapped (1995).
In The Coffin, Salem University student Tanner Leo’s father is an unpopular faculty member and psychiatrist and when he heads to Hawaii for a conference, she’s looking forward to having the house to herself, though this isolation backfires when a disgruntled patient uses the empty house—and more specifically, Dr. Leo’s soundproof music room—to hold Tanner captive in her own home. Kidnapped takes a different approach to the horror: when a three year old child, Mindy Donner, is taken from her home, the top suspect is Nora Mulgrew, an incoming Salem University freshman who works at the campus daycare center. Both books share a similar uncertainties—including the kidnapper’s motive and whether or not the kidnapped individuals will be found before it’s too late—but Hoh provides readers with two different perspectives, with the person being held captive in The Coffin and a wrongfully accused, anxious witness in Kidnapped.
The dramatic irony of Tanner’s imprisonment in The Coffin is that her father’s home is the last place she wants to be stuck. Tanner’s parents are divorced and she was raised by her mother, with little contact or relationship with her father. Since her father is a faculty member at Salem University, Tanner’s tuition there is free, and when the time comes for Tanner to go to college, she doesn’t have much choice in the matter. Tuition is free for professors’ children but room and board are not, which is how Tanner ends up uncomfortably sharing a house with a man she hasn’t spent any time with since she was eight years old. As Tanner reflects, “She had had no desire to see her father after all these years, much less live with him, but her mother was adamant. ‘Free is free,’ she’d said crisply, ‘and he owes us … He’s not an easy man to live with. But you’re tough. You can take it. And it’s only for four years’” (12). Dr. Leo lives in a beautiful old home on Faculty Row, but it is not a comfortable or welcoming place: “Meals in the lovely, ordered house were mostly silent, with cloth napkins folded just so; the tablecloth spotless … Tanner’s father asked her only about her grades, her achievements in her classes, making it clear from the outset that any grade below an A was unacceptable, and then he ate his dinner. Quietly. Not so much as a slurp, a burp, or a hiccough” (14). The only thing that makes life at her father’s house the least bit welcoming is Tanner’s friendship with their housekeeper, Mavis Sills, whose nickname is Silly.
Tanner is not comfortable in her father’s house and she is particularly uncomfortable in her father’s music room. Dr. Leo is an accomplished musician and has a sumptuously appointed and soundproof room for his instruments, which include a grand piano, a cello, and a xylophone, along with an expansive and valuable library of “rare musical manuscripts” (17). For Tanner, the music room is the epitome of her father’s stuffiness, as he demands that everything (including his daughter, who he is disappointed only plays the violin) must be well-organized and perfect at all times, an expectation Tanner can’t possibly live up to.
While Tanner lives with her father, much of the real action of her life takes place outside of the house, with the friends she has met on campus, including her best friend Jodie and her boyfriend Charlie. Their other friends include Sandy, who always manages to say just the wrong thing; laid back Vince; absent minded but brilliant Phillip; and Sloane, an obnoxious rich boy. They’re all looking forward to Tanner throwing a party at the Leo house while her father is out of town, but when she goes back to the house at the end of the first day of Dr. Leo’s absence, it’s like she simply disappears: no one answers the phone when her friends call and when Charlie goes to the house to make sure Tanner’s okay, he finds a mysterious and out-of-character note from Tanner, telling her friends that she has gone to join her mom, who is on vacation in “the Orient,” which in addition to being a culturally problematic identifier, is also so vague that it’s impossible for them to follow up to make sure this is where Tanner actually is and that she’s okay.
Unsurprisingly, Tanner is not okay. When she gets home that first night, Silly is mysteriously absent (though her purse is still under the kitchen table) and Tanner hasn’t been home long before she hears a strange noise, is knocked unconscious, and wakes up in the music room, face-to-face with a masked captor. When she asks him what he wants, his cryptic reply is “satisfaction” (51). He lays out his plan for Tanner, telling her “You’re not going to leave this room … This is where you’re going to spend your days. And your nights. You’re going to sleep in here. And eat in here, when I feel like bringing you some food … This is your room now, Tanner” (49). There’s a small bathroom in the music room, but it gets pretty chilly and Tanner doesn’t have any food or any way to communicate with the outside world. Her father has a state of the art surveillance system, which makes it possible for her to watch what’s going on outside, though she can’t make contact, and when she attempts to throw a lamp and a crystal candy dish at the shatterproof windows to try to get someone’s attention, she just ends up with glass in the carpet for her troubles, which cuts up her feet and causes even more problems. Things take an even darker turn when her captor shows up with a pile of lumber, nails, and a hammer, and builds an upright wooden box that he locks Tanner in for long periods of time when he decides she has been “bad” and needs to have her behavior corrected.
Tanner suffers at the hands of her captor, including lengthy periods locked in the box and the promise of ice cream, which ends horribly when he forces her to confront Silly’s dead body in the chest freezer, where he put it after he murdered her before Tanner came home that first night. The police ignore her friends’ concerns and the friends who do try to help her end up hurt, with Charlie run down by a motorcycle as he walks to Tanner’s house and Jodie knocked unconscious and tied up in the basement when she comes looking for Tanner. Throughout her ordeal, Tanner holds onto the thought of her friends as a lifeline, certain that they won’t believe the coerced note or give up looking for, if she can just hold on a little while longer. As a result of this unwavering faith, the discovery that the person who is holding her hostage is her friend Philip adds insult to injury. It turns out Philip had a psychotic break shortly after enrolling at Salem University the year before and Dr. Leo recommended long-term inpatient treatment at a mental health facility for him. As Philip explains to Tanner, “I had a few problems adjusting here. I made the mistake of talking to some stupid counselor, and he sent me to see the ever-popular psychiatrist, Dr. Milton Leo. And that was all she wrote. After five crummy sessions, like he could know who I was after only five forty-minute sessions, he shipped me off” (189). The treatment Philip received included confinement in a small space, similar to the coffin he builds for Tanner, and his threats to her are echoes of things that were said to him, as he says things like “You have no manners … None whatsoever! You need to be taught a lesson” (141). In the end, Charlie’s persistence and Tanner’s own ingenuity allow her to outsmart Philip and escape, with Philip destined to return to—hopefully more trauma-informed and productive—psychiatric treatment.
The perspectives are flipped in Kidnapped, where Nora is a suspect in Mindy’s kidnapping, but is just as clueless as everyone else about where the little girl is, why this is happening, and why the real kidnapper wants to implicate Nora. All of Nora’s friends and the police agree that it would be really suspicious for her to join the search party looking for Mindy, given that almost everyone on the Salem University campus and in the Twin Falls community (including many of her daycare center coworkers and the Donner family’s housekeeper Mary) believe she’s the one who took Mindy. Since she can’t help search, and the majority of her friends are out looking for the little girl, Nora spends a lot of time sitting around Nightingale Hall (better known as Nightmare Hall) alone, worrying both about whether Mindy is safe and what people think about Nora herself. Nora’s friends Lucas, Amy, Sabra, and Fitz seem to be the only ones who believe her, and they keep stopping by Nightingale Hall between their search party shifts to give her updates and see how she’s doing. The group is rounded out by a young police officer named Jonah Reardon, who is stationed at the house to keep an eye on her and seems steadfast in his belief of Nora’s innocence, which is likely buoyed by his attraction to her.
Someone is determined to make it look like Nora had something to do with Mindy’s disappearance–odd things keep turning up at Nightingale Hall, designed to either implicate or endanger Nora: the police find a candy box in Nora’s trash can with some of the little girl’s fingernail clippings in it, and one of Mindy’s sneakers turns up there as well. Nora gets hit in the head with a swing at the daycare center playground, has her arm impaled with a child-sized pitchfork in the barn behind the house, falls down the stairs at Nightingale Hall after stepping on a child’s roller skate, and is nearly strangled with a jump rope. Nora struggles to connect the dots and figure out why someone is targeting her, but she has no doubt that “It did have something to do with Mindy, she was sure of that … Every instrument used to ‘torture’ her had been a child’s thing. A swing, a youth-sized pitchfork, a child’s roller skate, and now, a jump rope. That part of the message was clear” (184, emphasis original).
Much like Philip’s grudge against Dr. Leo in The Coffin, past trauma is central to Kidnapped, though as Nora and her friends compare their family lives and their childhoods, it is clear that everyone has had their own struggles. Nora has been hesitant to tell her friends about her mother, who was in and out of residential mental health facilities throughout Nora’s childhood; she died when Nora was a teenager, and her father died not long after from a heart attack, though Nora’s own assessment is that he “had simply been too tired to continue living … worn out, after years of caring for an invalid wife and dealing with a daughter whose adolescence could only be called ‘emotionally charged’” (31). Lucas is an only child with an overprotective mother, Fitz had a little sister who died when he was young, Amy’s parents both died while she was in high school and she floated from one friend’s house to another until she graduated high school, and Sabra grew up with an alcoholic father in a large family, feeling invisible among all of her rambunctious brothers and sisters. After listening to her friends talk about their childhoods, she comes to the realization that “We’re not all that different … [W]here was the mythical perfect family she’d read about, dreamed about? Wished for? … No sign of it in this room” (127).
But some of the stories the friends tell are truer than others. While Nora tells them about her childhood to the absolute best of her ability and recollection, there are things about her own past that she doesn’t remember, including that she had an older sister who was kidnapped from the family’s backyard when Nora was three and her sister was five, a revelation that reframes her understanding of her mother’s depression and Nora’s own sense of self. And the story that Sabra tells is an intentional fabrication, designed to disguise who she really is: Nora’s kidnapped sister Nell, who grew up isolated in a cabin in the woods with the old woman who took her. The old woman died, Nell escaped, and her central goal now is to get revenge on Nora, who she believes intentionally forgot her and has spent the last fifteen years living the idyllic life that should have been Nell’s own, with “everything I never had, everything I was supposed to have. A nice house, a wonderful life, two loving parents, a happy home …” (227). But while this vision of Nora living some kind of charmed life has been eating away at Nell for all these years, none of it is true.
Just as Philip enacts some of the same traumas he experienced on Tanner, Nell/Sabra shifts from kidnapped to kidnapper, taking Mindy and keeping her in the garage apartment behind Nightingale Hall. When she knows the police will be searching the property, she takes Mindy into the woods behind the house. Before Nell/Sabra confesses, she tries to convince Nora that Fitz is the kidnapper, providing a glimpse of her own machinations under the guise of pointing the finger at someone else: “He saw the police at Nightmare Hall and he put Mindy in a laundry bag, tossed her over his shoulder, and walked right out of the apartment. No one saw him, but even if they had, they would have thought you were letting him do his laundry at the house. Because he’s a friend of yours, Nora. Someone you trust” (214). Nell struggled with the isolation and her captor’s control during her own kidnapping experience, but she now inflicts a similar ordeal on Mindy, keeping the child confined with no explanation and regaling the girl with stories of her own difficult life.
While these books’ narratives largely belong to Tanner and Nora, Hoh features the kidnappers’ perspectives prominently in both books as well, providing readers with insight into their thought processes and rationales. In fact, both books open with a prologue that features the kidnappers’ perspective. The Coffin has an extended prologue that puts readers within the confined space: “Air … I need air … Every time they put me in this dark, narrow, airless space, they insist, as I struggle and scream in fury at them, that there is plenty of air … It is always the same. In only minutes, my chest begins to ache, as if giant claws are squeezing it. My head hurts as my lungs struggle to pull in enough oxygen. I feel dizzy, as if I’ve been spinning in circles for hours” (1, emphasis original). With these opening pages, Hoh simultaneously aligns the reader with Philip’s past perspective and lays the sensory groundwork for the ordeal Tanner will face when he traps her in the music room and then in the coffin, blurring the lines between kidnapper and kidnapped. The prologue to Kidnapped is much briefer and more fragmented, with disjointed emotional ruminations, including questions of “Why haven’t they come to get me? Don’t they want me anymore? Was I bad?” before the speaker determines that “I wasn’t bad. They should come get me. I don’t want to be here. I hate this place” (1, emphasis original). This self-doubt and desperation then shade into outward-directed anger, as she reflects “I hate them for not coming to find me … If they don’t come, I’ll punish them” (1, emphasis original). In each case, the reader is aligned with the kidnapper, though they don’t know this in the opening pages. These perspectives and memories surface intermittently throughout both The Coffin and Kidnapped, with Philip telling Tanner about his experiences and Nell telling Mindy stories of her childhood in the cabin with her kidnapper. None of this justifies either of their actions, but these passages do provide the reader with insight into who they are and why they make the choices they do.
At the end of both The Coffin and Kidnapped, the kidnapper is apprehended and the captive is set free, reunited with friends and loved ones. Both Philip and Nell are set to receive psychiatric treatment and in Kidnapped, Nora is committed to being an active part of her sister’s recovery and rehabilitation. Nora doesn’t excuse her sister’s actions but she does tell her friends that she hopes “maybe someday you can know Nell too. Like I plan to” (244), her heart breaking for the sister she didn’t know she had. On the surface, it seems like all’s well that ends well, particularly for the released captives. But as The Coffin and Kidnapped prove, leaving a traumatic experience behind isn’t as easy as walking out a door and rejoining the outside world. Both Philip and Nell left the places they had been kept behind them, but the effects and nightmares of those experiences proved inescapable, resulting in them revisiting these same horrors on someone else. Tanner and Nora seem unlikely to follow in their captors’ footsteps, but the aftermath of these terrors will be difficult—if not impossible—to leave in the past.
