“Where are you now?”

“I am home,” Steven types onto a blank screen in the opening of “Silence Lay Steadily,” and pauses. “‘I am home,’ I thought, and stopped in wonder at the thought.”

“Are you awake now?”

Several episodes ago, I said that Hill House had done its worst to one of the Crains. And that was true then. But “Screaming Meemies,” which takes place long ago in the twisted timeline of The Haunting Of Hill House, does something so much worse.

It’s a sneaky piece of false logic that Hill House,…

“Witness marks tell the story of the piece if you know how to read them”

“You know it’s a mess, right?”

“I was right here. And none of you could see me.”

“We always believed you”

It’s not just the former inhabitants of Hill House who feel its sinister sway. The closer The Haunting Of Hill House takes us to Hill House, the more compelling the show becomes. The fragments of what happened that last night in the looming old house are coming together, and as “The Bent-Neck…

“They never believe me”

Still shattered from his ghastly encounter with the crawling figure in the bootleggers’ secret cellar, in “The Twin Thing,” young Luke Crain takes solace in the company of his “imaginary friend,” Abigail. Even with proof in the form of a ferocious rip in his pajamas, his parents tell him the…

“Whose hand was I holding?”

“I’m gonna fix her”

It looks like we’ll be treated to chapters focusing on the Crain children individually, weaving from past to present in an effort to show the traumas they each experienced in Hill House, and how those experiences shaped their characters and futures. “Open Casket” is a close-up on Shirley, the oldest…

Whatever walked there walked alone

“How much doubt are you folks comfortable with?” 

The biggest revelation of “Henry Deaver,” the penultimate episode of Castle Rock’s uneven first season, isn’t the identity of Bill Skargård’s The Kid. It’s the atrocity visited upon André Holland’s Henry when he went missing as a child.

That Henry—let’s call him Henry I—was missing for days. But he was imprisoned for…

There was always a danger, lurking since the premiere, that Castle Rock would get bogged down in recreating an auteur’s mythology or stylistic flourishes rather than developing its own world and its own characters. But I assumed it would at least be Stephen King’s mythology and Stephen King’s stylistic flourishes.…

“The Queen” is the most affecting, effective episode of Castle Rock’s first season so far, and a potent antidote to the missteps of “Filter.” Where “Filter” plunges into exposition and a would-be harrowing sequence of previously unimagined terror in Odin’s anechoic chamber, “The Queen” does something simpler, and far…

“What’s with all the missing pieces? Grandma?”

“It was that damned dog,” Ruth Deaver laments to her son in the aftermath of her leap from the bridge—from the Pangborn Bridge, dedicated seconds before her leap. “That damned dog” isn’t a St. Bernard like Cujo, but his bark is enough to rouse memories of the terrible siege in the Camber’s dooryard. Or maybe Ruth…

“There’s a lot of history in this town, and not all of it good,” Molly Strand straight-talks her out-of-town buyers when they discover the home they’re touring belonged to the warden of a notorious prison, who performed an even more notorious suicide just days ago. With that line, “The Box” seems determined to…

“Has it begun?”

“Remember the dog? The strangler? Sure you do.” Early in Castle Rock’s second episode, Dale Lacy’s voice-over sets the tone for “Habeas Corpus.” In the title sequence (introduced in this episode), torn pages from Stephen King’s oeuvre allude to horrors he’s written over the decades. The Shining. It. Misery. The Green…