Halloween at the House That AI Built
There is a Halloween party a third of the way into Jetson’s Journey, and it is the most expensive party I have ever thrown. It cost me nothing but a chapter. Animatronic skeletons that dance and cackle. Fog machines. A talking skeleton with glowing red eyes. Five bartenders in black suits and dark sunglasses, all doing their best Keanu Reeves. A haunted garden floating in an infinity pool. Chapter Ten. Portola Valley, California. October thirty-first.
The costumes come down the stairs first: fairy wings, an astronaut helmet, a sorceress dress from a thrift store, a wizard hat. And a black Lab named Jetson, who “watches the commotion from his spot by the door, red cape already fastened around his neck, patient as a saint.”
The house that AI built
The party happens at the Harker house, which I invented, on streets I did not. The family parks on Cervantes Road as the last light fades; the walk to the front door runs past a front-yard pirate ship with its own skeleton crew and its own fog. The house itself is three stories of stone and glass, every window glowing. A guest sums up the host in one line: “He calls it the house that AI built.”
I lived on the San Francisco Peninsula for more than forty years before life rerouted me to Tennessee, and anyone who has trick-or-treated in those hills knows I did not invent the wattage. I only invented the address.
Manufactured fear
Everything frightening at that party is on somebody’s payroll. The skeleton that growls “Welcome, mortals” is a hired actor behind a tree with a microphone. The dead bodies in the pool are college swimmers in makeup. The fog arrives by machine and leaves by fan. It is fear as a catering category.
That is the design of the chapter, not a joke at the host’s expense. By Chapter Ten, Michael Sawyer has lost his job and is watching the ground come up fast—and he walks through all that rented terror carrying the only thing at the party that is actually frightening. It doesn’t glow. It doesn’t cackle. It doesn’t run on a fog machine.
The craft rule I took away from writing it: if you want a reader to feel real fear, surround it with the purchased kind. The rented scares give the real one somewhere to stand.
The one night everyone wears a mask
Halloween is the only night when pretending is the whole social contract, which makes it strangely honest. Everyone at the party is dressed as something they are not. Michael is the only one dressed as something he used to be: he adjusts his wizard hat—“the same one from last year, crushed.” Last year, when life still fit. A costume is a small time machine. You put on whoever you were the last time you wore it.
There is a moment inside the house, in front of a display cabinet, when Michael catches his own reflection in the glass and does not like what looks back. I’ll say no more than that, except that it is the cheapest special effect in the chapter and the one that scared me most to write.
The dog is not in disguise
And then there is Jetson, in the red cape, patient by the door. A dog cannot be in costume in the way that matters. You can fasten a cape on him; you cannot make him pretend. In a chapter where every adult is performing something, the dog is the only guest telling the truth. That is why he gets the cape, and the first look, and the spot by the door.
The party ends early for the Sawyers. Not because of the animatronics—because Michael’s daughter asks him a question he can’t answer honestly, and when he tries, she hands down the verdict that gives the chapter its last word: “You always say ‘grown-up stuff’ when you’re lying.” A costume only works if nobody looks too closely. Children always look too closely.
If you want to know what happens after the porch lights go out on Cervantes Road, the novel is out in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle.
One more thing. On October 30, this chapter comes to life. Come back then.
Happy Halloween from Franklin. The real Jetson has not yet approved this year’s cape.
—Brock
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