Written by Katie W., Pacifica Libraries
A sunny day for a decent town’s dark tradition. An angry house feeding on a fractured psyche. Sisters enmeshed and isolated by a dark family secret.
Driven by graceful, unsettling prose and unnerving insight into the trauma and brutality beating just under the banal, Shirley Jackson’s short stories and novels are essential entries into a 20th century suburban American gothic.
Born and raised in Burlingame, Jackson is a favorite of literary powerhouses, opens a new window like Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King and Carmen Maria Machado.
Let’s look at a selection of Shirley Jackson’s most famous works, certain to provide the heebie-jeebies this Halloween.
The Lottery and Other Stories (1949)
“The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.”
The titular short story in this collection might be the most upsetting reading you were assigned in junior high. Those who’ve long forgotten the name Shirley Jackson likely still wince remembering The Lottery.
Huh? What’s so upsetting about a clear and sunny day? Or townspeople gathering with their neighbors, participating in tradition and community?
If you haven’t read or don’t remember The Lottery, you won’t find spoilers here. Instead, I’ll offer these fun facts:
- After publishing The Lottery in 1948, The New Yorker faced a flood of hate mail, opens a new window and canceled subscriptions.
- It’s now one of the most anthologized, opens a new window short stories in history.
No need to keep yourself in suspense! Check out The Lottery and Other Stories at the library or read it on The New Yorker’s website. (Did you know you can also access The New Yorker’s back catalog using Libby?)
The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”
This opening line sets the thematic stage for an essential haunted house novel. Hill House, Jackson continues, is “not sane.”
What will happen, then, to the cast of characters who gather within? The philosopher determined to find scientific proof of supernatural activity. The young, unhappy woman accepted to his team after a life grayed by isolation and overbearing mothering. Her inverse, the bright, gifted laboratory assistant prone to flashes of cruelty.
These characters and more soon learn the power of rageful ghosts any home might contain.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)
“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”
As this short, chilling novel is my favorite of the works listed here, I treated myself—and you—with the whole opening paragraph. What an introduction!
Mary Katherine remains our narrator, describing her gossipy town’s sing-song taunts, her sister’s dutiful efforts to keep house and the fenced-in fortress of their family house—the sisters’ beloved castle, or so Merricat thinks.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a vivid, warped tale of outcasts, superstition and the secrets we swallow for family.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Unearth Hidden Horrors With Shirley Jackson
The hit Netflix adaptation: The Haunting of Hill House
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