With apologies to Alice Sebold, I have to admit that I have not read The Lovely Bones.  My reading tends to be patchy at best–I usually get around to bestsellers after everyone else on the planet has read them.  But I think I deliberately avoided The Lovely Bones, in print and film, because, although my daughter is no longer a teenager, the premise of the book played on the worst of my unvoiced and only partially acknowledged fears for her when she was the age of the heroine in the story.

Then, tonight, watching the Oscars, I saw the clip where Stanley Tucci, playing Mr. Harvey, lures Susie into his underground den in the cornfield, and I had the most bizarre flashback.  I had a recurring nightmare as a small child.  We lived in the country then, with pasture in front of the house and a creek with steep banks that curved around three sides in the back.  In my dream, I was walking along the creek when I discovered a fireplace-like opening in the side of the bank.  Curious, I went in, and found myself in a cozy underground room.  There were small, bald (sorry, Stanley!) gnome-like men who invited me to tea.  And then–the worst horror my four or five-year-old mind could conjure–ate me.  (Yeah, I’m sure the psychologists could have lots of fun with that.  And this, of course, was the point at which I would wake up screaming.)

Years later, when I read the Narnia books for the first time, I thought that the bankside den of my dream was a little like a warped version of Mr. Tumnus’s home.  But now I see that the set designer for The Lovely Bones must have had a sneak pass into my subconscious, because Mr. Harvey’s den was snatched whole right out of my dream.

How very odd, and a little unsettling.  Do children come equipped with an atavistic fear of caves?  Some sort of Jungian archetype, perhaps?  Silly, maybe, but I’d just as soon not revisit my own particular childhood demons.  But I may have to read Alice Sebold’s novel.