Dark Tales - Shirley Jackson

Why do all these amazing female American authors die so young? Flannery O’Connor was 39. Carson McCullers cracked 50, but only just. Shirley Jackson, who died when she was 48, falls in between the two. (at least we got Ursula Le Guin for a good long while).

I mourn the lost novels and stories that died along with these women, and though I would consider O’Connor the greatest literary author of the three (check that, I consider Flannery O’Connor the greatest literary author, male or female, to have ever lived), I think it is Jackson’s unrealized later work that I pine for the most. Her stories distilled horror down to its purest essence, eschewing Lovecraftian lore or Kingian brutality for an understated but palpable dread that thrums in every word.

Nothing all that bad usually happens on the page in a Shirley Jackson story. There is an occasional death, but the method isn’t gruesome and there are no cosmic, world-ending stakes. There is only the flawlessly articulated sense that something is off, the subaural hum of menace that rattles your fillings even when its too faint to pick out a note.

The plots in Dark Tales are vague and minimal, the endings often ambiguous (occasionally a bit too ambiguous if I’m being honest), the characters hasty sketches by a talented hand. What is left is a mood, realized with a precision that may very well be unmatched by any English author. You feel a Shirley Jackson story. It gets in your blood.

I could provide summaries of some of the stories, but there’s little point. It’s not about what happens, but how it happens (if it indeed happened at all). Which brings me to another point: Shirley Jackson feels like an author of supernatural fiction, but supernatural things rarely if ever happen in her stories. There are a few elements in Dark Tales, but even they could be tricks of the mind rather than actual occurrences. They read like ghost stories, even if the ghost in question may only be a gust of wind or a creaking floorboard.

Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk - Jon Doe with Tom DeSavia and Friends

X is releasing a final album and going on a farewell tour, and while final albums aren’t always final and farewell tours are almost never a farewell, I’m concerned enough they mean it to travel to Rochester on my own and see them while I still can. Buying my ticket got me in the mood to read a book I’d purchased years ago but hadn’t gotten around to until just now: Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk.

In my experience, a book authored by musician “with” another writer is usually little more than a biography in first person, the perspective belying the obvious distance of the actual subject to what’s being written. Here, though, the “and friends” gives a better hint of what the book is about. Rather than a straight up autobiographical account of Doe’s live before, during, and after X’s heyday, Under the Big Black Sun has the patchwork feel of an oral history, with musicians, writers, and scenesters contributing their own stories and perspectives on the unique scene that emerged in late 70s LA.

Doe gets the most page time, but in a way his parts are the least narrative of the book, focusing as they do on small moments and assuming (correctly, in my case) that the reader already knows the general story of the band. Most of the other contributors take the more traditional route, charting their arrival in LA and immersion into a small but rich musical scene, though the focus is almost always on the culture rather than the specific band, furthering the anthropological sense of the book. There are a couple of missteps, but for the most part the writers feel like earnest people wistfully recollecting a difficult but formative time in their lives. Contributors namecheck bands with frequency, and I came across a few artists I’d never heard of and now adore (Nightmare City by the Alley Cats is incredible). There were also bands I knew but had never associated with the punk scene (The Go-Go’s, really?).

As befitting an anthology, the book is a grab bag of styles, and while some went more florid than others, I found the whole thing well constructed and readable, with only a couple passages that struck me as indulgent and over-written.

Overall, a solid book for those interested in a scene that, while not launching many marquee names, undoubtedly influenced American music for the rest of the century.