What’s Up With the Title?

The title is pretty straightforward: the haunted locale around which the story revolves is "The Red Room." That title grabs you, doesn’t it? And not just because it’s short and alliterative (repeating the same sound). It’s all about the red. You see a lot of white rooms, or blue rooms, or yellow rooms, probably because they’re comforting colors that easily fade into the background and just become "ambience." (How about that drab hospital green?) You don’t see a lot of red rooms. Red is loud, attention getting, the kind of thing that makes a serious statement. Even if there is a red room in a house, chances are that room is a living room or kitchen, and not a bedroom. Would you want to sleep in a red room? And just think of all the eerie associations. You hear "red room" and you might think of bloodstained walls, or fire. Or something even worse: red wallpaper loud enough to drive a person crazy.