Now this is more like it.
While her earlier novels show flashes of the vicious insight and dark, surreal tone of her last two works, The Sundial is the book where Shirley Jackson truly finds fourth gear, a speed she will maintain for the rest of her tragically short career.
Here we have all the key trappings of her later works: a stately but decrepit manor house, a family whose aristocratic origins have tarnished with age, a surrounding village with an air of ineffable distance and malevolence, a family where murderous hostility roils beneath a skein of politeness, and above all an atmosphere of quiet, stuffy dread, where malign forces, unspoken but keenly sensed, crouch behind every syllable.
The plot concerns Orianna Halloran, matriarch of the Halloran family, who has recently inherited the family home following the untimely death of her son—a death for which her son’s widow Maryjane suspects she is responsible. At a family gathering, Orianna’s sister Fanny goes for a walk through the grounds, where she receives a vision of her late father declaring the coming apocalypse, from which only those in the family home will be spared.
The family’s relatively casual acceptance of this revelation is one of the surreal elements of the novel. While in some ways unrealistic, it fits with the slightly warped characters who occupy the mansion. The rest of the story concerns their efforts to prepare for doomsday, and he interplay of relationships and grievances between the characters.
Unlike Hill House, nothing provably supernatural happens in the Sundial, for Fanny’s visions could simply be hallucinations, and the visions of the future Gloria glimpses in the oiled mirror are undercut by the fact she announces them in advance, which means the family could, consciously or not, connive to make them accurate. Yet the sense of exterior forces extends beyond mood at times, such as the skeptic Julia’s efforts to leave the mansion, thwarted through the inexplicable malice of a cab driver and a prevailing fog that shepherds her back to the grounds.
The Sundial is a worthy companion to Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. A must-read for fans of those books.