Just out today: Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories (Library of America)...with an afterword by Joyce Carol Oates (I can't think of any other writer more suited for the job of writing about Ms. Jackson, the two women both have the sense of the macabre about them!!)
I'm so excited I can barely type...okay, maybe I exaggerate just a tad (I'm holding my index finger and thumb close together right now)...
For someone who looked so safe in her publicity stills, Shirley Jackson was anything but. An inspiration to Stephen King (whose photo DEFINITELY gives you a clue to his dark side), Jackson wrote stories that are creepy because you can’t sweep them under the bed, thinking they could never happen in real life.
Her infamous short story "The Lottery" eerily captures the brute force of a small town gone wrong, years before mob mentality became front page news. But as chilling and powerful as "The Lottery" is, it’s her lesser known tales that are my absolute favorites and (I think) her true gems.
Some of the stories are downright scary; besides "The Lottery," there’s the bizarre and chilling "The Intoxicated," where a teenage girl startles a grown man with her vision of the future. Others, including “Charles” — complete with a startling twist at the end — are surprisingly adorable and funny. And some are heartbreakingly sad, as is “The Daemon Lover” where a hopeful, deluded woman waits a LONG time for the fiance who never shows at her door.
Response to the publication of "The Lottery" in the New Yorker was so strong many people canceled their subscriptions: response to "The Lottery"
(This essay gets to the heart of why some of us Shirley Jackson fans love her work so much!)
Jackson was not particularly prolific, but what she did write (including posthumously released collections like Just An Ordinary Day) was (and still is) often downright delicious.
Also included in the Library of America edition (it's about time LOA recognize how great a writer Jackson was!) are the two unnerving novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
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