The Thief Of Always

A modern-day version of the fairy tale gingerbread house, Holiday House is the place where Harvey enjoys fantastical adventures and learns many important life lessons. It is an illusory mansion that overlooks many acres of lovely lawns, gardens, and trees. The building stands “four stories high, and boast[s] more windows than Harvey could readily count” (16). Inside, the hallways are maze-like, each door unique, and every aspect of the House renders it a place designed to delight the children ensnared within its grounds. It contains infinite space for its doomed residents, and the children sleep upstairs in beautiful bedrooms, one for each of them.

The House’s four servants—Rictus, Jive, Marr, and Carna—also live upstairs and interact with the children periodically to urge them to indulge their darker desires. However, the owner, Mr. Hood, never appears until Harvey climbs up to the attic and confronts him directly. At that point, Mr. Hood’s face appears there, spread across the attic ceiling. Harvey discovers that Mr. Hood is the House, which controls all the effects of the resort and produces the magic that delights visiting children and ultimately ensnares them in a slow march toward death. Throughout the novel, Holiday House stands as the physical manifestation of Mr. Hood’s nefarious designs. Each transformation it undergoes and each gift that it offers serves as yet another example of his infinite illusions and craft manipulations. The antagonist and the House are one and the same: a concentrated form of evil whose purpose is to entice children to succumb to its wonders so that it may steal their souls and life energy. Its wicked work serves as a lesson to young people that happiness ostensibly offered for free in reality conceals a hideous price, and thus the pleasures of Holiday House are revealed to be the ultimate trap, not the freely given gifts they initially appear to be.