Shirley Jackson — Justin Reads

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.

I first read The Haunting of Hill House in a larger collection of Shirley Jackson’s work, and while I enjoyed it, it was overshadowed by We Have Always Lived In the Castle, Jackson’s greatest work and, to my eyes, one of the crowning achievements of 20th century literature. But Hill House really is an excellent book, and I was happy to revisit unhappy Eleanor as she undergoes her strange symbiosis with the eponymous building. For that’s how I always interpreted the book: the house found her and knew her for its own and, through its designs, kept her.

Eleanor is masterfully rendered in this book. Jackson creates remarkable characters, but Eleanor may be her crowning achievement, even more than Merricat Blackwood (though Merricat will always be my favourite). Broken by the toil and slow cruelty of an unhappy childhood cap-stoned by her years as her mother’s nursemaid—details revealed only in secondhand snippets, but precise and vivid enough to undergird a novel all their own—Eleanor tumbles from subservience to her mother to subservience to her sister. A letter from Dr. Montague inviting her to participate in a study of the paranormal gives her a chance to escape, and she snatches it with wild abandon.

In a lesser book, Montague would be the villain, his purposes for drawing disparate characters to Hill House convoluted and sinister. But he is actually a sympathetic man struggling to unite the spiritual and empiricist halves of his mind, a longstanding battle that informs his particular, idiosyncratic fascination with the paranormal. The glamorous Theodora, very much a mirror opposite of Eleanor, is the only other invitee to arrive, apart from Luke Sanderson, nephew of the house’s owner who is foisted off to keep him out of trouble. The fact that he actually doesn’t need such keeping is another detail a lesser writer would have missed.

Jackson’s characters are not broad. They are complex and troubled and hard to pin down. They bounce form camaraderie to conflict with such rapidity that it can feel shocking, but it all feels earned and natural. There are hints that the house may be manipulating them, but the extent of this is never clear. Even the actions of the ghost—if indeed there is a ghost; I tend to think the spirit is the house itself, birthed in trauma, rather than restless human soul—are opaque despite being realized in great detail (the cold spot is a nice touch, and the phantom hand Eleanor holds in an imagined darkness is one of the sharpest scenes in any horror book). Jackson draws few signposts, and the reader can infer to the best of their ability what exactly causes the final tragic events to unfold.

A neat parallel to We Have Always Lived in the Castle is the arrival of Dr. Montague’s wife, whose pigheaded spiritualism clashes with his own more nuanced take, causing a disruption in line with that of Merricat’s cousin in the later book. Their relationship is magnificently rendered, frosty without any of the cliches that mar depictions of martial strife in many other stories.

Shirley Jackson is one of America’s greatest writers. Had she not somehow excelled herself with Castle, Hill House would be her magnum opus. Any author would be proud to have such a book as their best work. The fact it is only number 2 speaks to her tremendous talent.