SLPAD - 97 - "Low-Lands" - 10

[Michael Bailey]

...the house rose in a big mossy tumulus out of the earth, its color that
of one of the shaggier prehistoric beasts. Inside were priest-holes and
concealed passageways and oddly angled rooms; and in the cellar, leading
from the rumpus room, innumerable tunnels, which writhed away radically
like the tentacles of a spastic octopus into dead ends, storm drains,
abandoned sewers and occasionally a secret wine cellar. Dennis and Cindy
Flange had lived in this curious moss-thatched,
               almost organic mound for the seven years of their marriage
and in this time Flange at least had come to feel attached to the place by
an umbilical cord woven of lichen and sedge, furze and gorse; he called it
his womb with a view....


What is a tumulus: an ancient grave mound

Really I don't think I have to lean in & read super closely here to get 2
important things

1) in Ghostbusters where Ray is trying to explain the unique architecture
of the building & Egon, or maybe Venkman, goes, "So, you're saying, they
don't build 'em like they used to?"
And Ray goes, "They never built them like this!"
- which would apply here as well.

Like the rumpus room, the house description has intertextual passageways
into the House of Usher, Lovecraft, Amityville, and even the Montauk bunker
in BE.


2) and of course, Flange's overt, outspoken,   confusion of this place
(which the narrator has likened to a tomb) with a womb: he even sings about
it.