The Thief Of Always

Holiday House offers endless visions of childhood happiness to enthrall its visitors and keep them long enough to steal their lives and indeed, their very souls. Faced with the lush extravagance of endless holidays, eternal summer afternoons, and daily gifts that meet their deepest desires, the enslaved children find it impossible to resist Mr. Hood’s many lures. Trapped in a prison of their own desires, they end their vastly shortened lives as victims of the House who are doomed to transform into mournful fish and live forever after in emptiness and misery. Throughout the course of their adventures, Harvey, Lulu, and Wendell learn that it is far better to live an ordinary life and endure its periodic dullness, than to pay the heavy spiritual price of indulging their every whim with no thought of the consequences.

At Holiday House, everything is designed to please and entertain its denizens, lulling them into a false sense of security. As the days flit past, each one represents a full turn of the seasons, and rather than having to wait for the various pleasures that each part of the year represents, the children get to have them all at once, experiencing the very best of each season within the space of a single day: springtime breezes, summer heat, the rustle of fall leaves, and the gentle snowfall of winter. Similarly, every evening is a flurry of holidays, and every meal is a delicious feast. Flowers bloom perfectly, toys abound, and games and other activities offer continuous entertainment. Yet by creating this world of endless pleasure, Barker also builds a sense of looming dread that savvy readers will sense from the very beginning of the tale. Indeed, the novel draws from many literary traditions ranging from the inherent dangers of gingerbread houses to the cautionary morals of age-old fables, and thus it is clear from the start that the idyllic surroundings of Holiday House must hide a multitude of dark, poisonous secrets rife with the threat of death and ruin.

Accordingly, although the children enjoy their surroundings, its splendor leaves them empty, for every pleasure is freely given; there’s no challenge, and deprived of worthy goals to strive for, the children are denied struggle and triumph of personal growth. The novelty of nightly Christmas celebrations soon palls, and the constant reappearance of Halloween likewise loses its thrill. Snow showers and hot sunshine become likewise unremarkable. Weakened by continual ease, the youngsters grow soft, passive, and pliable: easy prey for Mr. Hood’s insatiable appetite as he slowly extracts the life force from their souls.

Confronted by the paradoxical sameness involved in having access to anything he might possibly desire, Harvey soon begins to miss his everyday life beyond the Holiday House resort. Back home, the very existence of boring stretches between life’s highlights makes the high points all the sweeter, and he soon realizes that in order to be truly valued and savored, good things must not happen all at once in a jumble of sensory overload but must instead be experienced slowly. Real happiness, he learns, cannot be obtained in a greedy rush. By the time most children realize their mistake, it’s too late to escape, but as the hero of the tale, Harvey is clear-headed enough to find an escape route. When he does get home, he makes a promise to himself: that “[t]ime would be precious from now on” (213).