The Uncanny Fiction of Shirley Jackson
December 14 marked the anniversary of the birth of writer Shirley Jackson, known for her uncanny short stories and novels and her mordant fictionalized accounts of motherhood. Her work juxtaposes the horrific and the picayune to reveal the cruelty lurking beneath the veneer of everyday life. Regarding her famous short story, “The Lottery,” a tale of murderous rituals carried out in small-town America which provoked an uproar upon its 1948 publication, she remarked, “I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.” The same dichotomy informs her novels—including the deeply strange We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House, widely regarded as one of the finest haunted house stories ever written—as well as the humorously sardonic tales of parenting collected in books like Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages, which she called a “disrespectful memoir of my children.”
Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in Jackson’s work. New editions of Jackson’s fiction have been published by the Library of America and Penguin Classics, and in 2007 the Shirley Jackson Awards were established to honor “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror and the dark fantastic.”
If you would like to explore the work of Shirley Jackson, who Jonathan Lethem called “one of this century’s most luminous and strange American writers,” try one of the books below.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Audiobook available through Hoopla and Overdrive
Audiobook available as a Playaway and through Hoopla and Overdrive
Hangsaman
The Lottery and Other Stories
Just an Ordinary Day
Life Among the Savages
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