#the house of secrets

[thenightling]

Why Morpheus won’t separate Cain and Abel to save Abel

   Before The Sandman was a thing, long, long ago Cain and Abel were old Horror anthology comic hosts.   Cain hosted The House of Mystery.  Abel hosted the House of Secrets. Cain, Abel, Eve, Lucien, The Hecate, The mad Mod witch, and even Destiny were all old horror anthology hosts.   Cain and Abel were the DC equivalent of the Crypt Keeper and The Vault Keeper from EC comics.   They would antagonize each other but ultimately loved each other and The Crypt Keeper (In this case Cain) usually would best his brother in their competitions and mischief against each other.   In The Sandman they are the personifications of the idea of Cain and Abel.  Lucifer respect's Cain's mark but it's also suggested that they are also Romulus and Remus and in Tales in The Sand we see their forms change based on what the human dreamer expects to see.  They were black for Nada.  Eve even says "I'm not really your mother." to Cain. In the context of The Sandman Morpheus made their existences as comfortable as possible.  Cain and Abel would exist as a pair with or without him. They're a set of architypes.  They are characters of story.   They were likely created by the collective human unconscious, the very idea of who Cain and Abel are supposed to be.  That's why Daniel was able to re-create Abel when The Kindly Ones killed him in a way he would not revive from.

Cain and Abel are two parts of a whole.  They are incomplete without each other and deeply suffer if one is missing. It's not a normal human abusive relationship. They are two parts of a story. Imagine if half your body was missing. That's how one feels without the other. They literally need each other or they feel incomplete. Neil used them as an allegory for domestic abuse but that doesn't mean they can be resolved like an actual codependent domestic abuse situatution.  No amount of therapy can fix them and to sesparate them would only make them suffer far worse than Cain's routine killings.   If Cain isn't there Abel is likely to start killing himself to compensate or seek harm some other way and no amount of therapy will fix that. With Cain however there's the promise that the story will reset within a few hours and they can enjoy some tea together or tell a scary story to a visitor.   Ultimately the real tragedy is that they love each other but Cain is a slave to the story he must act out.   And Abel, being the keeper of secrets, knows this.  It's a compulsion.   When he says Cain can't help it, he means it.  It's not like an abusive husband where he can learn to control himself. He simply MUST fulfil the story.  He has no choice.  The need to kill to Abel will over come him.   Sometimes Cain feels bad about it (that's why he gave him Goldie's egg in the comics).  Sometimes he tries to make light of it like they are back in their horror host days.   Sometimes he tries to do it quickly so they can go back to being kind to each other.  ("I'll see myself out.  It's your turn to make dinner.")  

Morpheus was never cruel to them by keeping them together.   He wasn't "enabling abuse."   Saying you can't forgive him keeping them together is to badly misunderstand the situation.   They would seek each other with or without him. And the collective human unconscious NEEDS them.  They embody a type of story.  Not only that but they are nightmare weavers. They create nightmares.  Cain introduces himself as such when he's nursing Morpheus back to health in The Sandman issue 2 (Chapter 2) Imperfect hosts.   The Dreaming NEEDS them.   Cain creates all the Nightmares that are mysterious.  Abel creates the ones that hide secrets.   They are the keepers of Mystery and Secrets.  

  Caitlin R. Kiernan went even further with her version of The Dreaming (though it’s no longer canon) to suggest that if one went missing humans would go mad.  Without Cain a primal violent urge in humanity would rise and cause a spike self-harm, abuses, and murder.  Cain was, according to her, a vicarious outlet for those darker urges. This is not to say their situation is hopeless.  No.   An ex-friend of mine had a theory that as the collective idea of who Cain and Abel are evolves, so do they.  And that means if a more popular version of them emerges where Cain doesn't want to kill his brother, or stops himself, that version will be what they embody.  So there is a chance that one day they will change. Remember, Merv was once a Turniphead according to the The Tempest.  Creatures of story change according to the collctive idea of that story. Morpheus knew that their story was a tragic and harsh one. He is not the cause of it.  He is, however, the source of their only comfort.   The promise that the story resets, that Abel always recovers and they can still have tea together later.   That they can live side by side MOST of the time peacefully (When Cain isn't fulfilling his compulsive need to kill Abel). Abel, being the keepr of secrets, knows one great secret.   That Cain does love him and can't bear to be without him.   And that's why he puts up with it.   Their story is a cruel one but Morpheus didn't cause it.   What he gave them is the comfort between the routines.  Their big old haunted houses and graveyard where they can have tea and raise gargoyles together.  It's the only comfort he can give them.   To separate them would be far worse. Morpheus has done a lot of terrible and stupid things.  Letting Cain and Abel house The Houses of Mystery and Secrets together is not one of them.

[weirdlookindog]

The House of Secrets (1936)

[all-action-all-picture]

Weird War Tales No. 36, April 1975. Cover by Joe Kubert. This issue features a reprint of the 2 page story "The Day After Doomsday..." by Len Wein and Jack Sparling which had originally appeared in The House of Secrets No. 86, June-July 1970.

Many will find, um, some similarity (or lots) with the later "A Second Chance..." by Alan Moore and Jose Casanovas, a 2 page Tharg's Future Shock from 2000AD prog 245, dated 2 January 1982.

[outismm]

House of Secrets and House of Mystery my beloveds <3

[bizarrobrain]

The House of Secrets #125 - art by Luis Dominguez

[pulpfan1971]

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https://archive.org/details/HouseOfSecretsV1115

[krafty1]

"A Connecticut Ice Cream Man In King Arthur's Court"

ImageCredit: DC Comics The House of Secrets #123 Cover Artist: Frank Robbins Publisher: DC Comics Cover Date: September 1974 I love Bronze Age DC horror comics. Weird War Tales, Black Magic, Doorway to Nightmare, Swamp Thing, House of Mystery, and even Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love. So many great stories are done by some of the best in comics.

[hpmort]

My review of House of SecretS

By Chris Columbus and Ned Vizzini

I didn’t like it.

I also feel like it wasn’t fully edited? The character of Eleanor is initially written as a Generic Small Child, of the sort that people who don’t know what small children are like write, which often bothered me when I was in lower elementary, as it was forbidden to read books “below your reading level” and I was reading at a Middle Reader/Young Adult level (it wasn’t rendered as such, there was some kind of numerical scale involved) when I was a small child. Also I don’t have dyslexia, my only references to the internal experience are Arthur and Percy Jackson, but I do know that it isn’t dyscalculia, and the part that was meant to establish her as dyslexic (explicitly confirmed later in the book) had her messing up with numbers, not letters.

(I am not clinically dyscalculic, but I can’t read numbers well enough to perform long division. I used to do decent mental math, but then the school system beat it out of me. Also I have spacial dysgraphia bad enough that my third grade teacher gave up and had me do my work on a sad little electric typewriter thing, but dysgraphia hasn’t been considered dyslexia since sometime in the 1900s and this book was published in 2013, so this is a largely unrelated tangent)

Actually, the primary cast in general starts out as flat stereotypes of children that might show up as minor characters in something with an adult target audience, and the way they are written later on isn’t so much as character development, or them revealing inner depth, but rather the authors spontaneously discovering that children are people and writing them as such, or perhaps simply learning how to write characters in general.

Once they reach that point, the children realize as actual characters, and Eleanor is actually depicted quite well, a realistic little girl- she knows when she’s being condescended to, she’s reasonably clever, and when told that there is a big tarantula, she reacts like all the little girls I have ever known react- she wants to see it.

Also, it would probably anger antis about the problematic™️ness of the canon ship (15yo Cordelia and 17yo Will) and also giving me not one, but two problematic ships, a Yuri and a het one, both of which are very rare for me?

I feel like Dahlia was done dirty by the writers, and liked her chemistry with Cordelia. The ending was kind of an ass-pull, and the only book that Denver Kristoff had written that seems like it would actually work as a book is The Fighting Ace; probably we just lacked the context for The Heart and the Helm, but the timeline doesn’t exactly add up for Savage Warriors; the way the book is discussed is such that Celine isn’t the central character, and if she is intended to be the protagonist, she is remarkably flat. I don’t think that people went out of their way to write fantasy heroines for the sake of doing so, if they didn’t already have some ideas for their characterization, or at least story reasons, at the time. And she reads like a flat love interest besides.

There are apparently sequels, which will probably explain the unexplained Lovecraft-adjacent stuff, but I don’t expect to seek them out. I have many more books to read, and most of them are significantly more promising and were purchased for reasons other than “hey, this is only a dollar”

Also I managed to read it in not quite one sitting, but in four hours nonetheless; I had taken a few breaks, for eating and getting water, as well as pacing and just being anxious.

[thenightling]

The Hidden Ghost story in The Sandman:In the comics when Abel names Goldie the Gargoyle he says he named him after a friend who went away.   In the old House of Secrets Horror anthology comics Abel would often tell his stories to his "Imaginary friend" Goldie.  

Cain would taunt him that Goldie isn't real but whenever Abel wasn't around Cain would start addressing her and talking to her, making it clear he knew she was really there.  

 The editor of The House of Secrets once said that this woman on this cover is who Goldie The ghost is the ghost of.   I guess we can assume she moved on.Characters in the Horror anthology comics that did not carry over to The Sandman include Goldie the ghost.  Oskar (Cain's cat) and Rover, Lucien's pet werewolf.

[weirdlookindog]

The House of Secrets #96 - DC Comics, February-March 1972.

Cover art by Bernie Wrightson.

[caramelldansenu]

How I thought the reveal was gonna play out

Amity: Luz is it true? You helped belos?

Luz: HUNTER'S A GRIMWALKER

[sualne]

Modern AU crocodad, having a normal one.

[kat-rose-griffith]

Eloise: have you told him that you’re whistledown yet???

Penelope: listen, a lot has happened in the last hour. I need a minute

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The penisest of tunes.

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https://archive.org/details/HouseOfSecretsV1114Ctc1973