ABSTRACT
Throughout his work on the poetics of space, Bachelard returns repeatedly to the image of the house as a space of safety, a protection from external dangers, from storms on winter nights. However frail and vulnerable the individual might be, bricks and mortar provide them with a nest, a sanctuary, a place to retire to. This chapter examines Bachelard's notion of the house as a space of shelter and peace, but it does so via another kind of house, the fabric of which entraps nightmares rather than nurturing dreams. When we dare to enter the House of Doom, we learn much about the ideal home.
