The Road Through the Wall / Hangsaman - Shirley Jackson

I got on a Shirley Jackson kick late in 2025 and decided to read her novels in the order in which they were published. I finished the first two, The Road Through the Wall and Hangsaman, in a row, but other things drew my attention during The Bird’s Nest and so I’ve put it aside for now (not for want of its quality; I’m sure I’ll revisit it later). I’m combining the first two in one entry as I don’t have a ton to say about them individually.

Jackson’s prose is polished from the start, and there is no awkward phrasing or self-conscious overwriting common to new novelists, particularly those writing “literary fiction.” The writing is excellent, but the stories are not yet as strong as they will become. Jackson is, at her core, a short story writer, and in these early books, she doesn’t seem to have fully mastered a lengthier form (something she would ultimately do to tremendous effect with The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle). Though enigmatic and far from action-packed pulps, those latter works showed a flow and rhythm that suited their length. Her first two, by contrast, can feel formless at times.

The Road Through the Wall feels the least “Jacksonian” of the bunch, which makes sense given it was an early work. the voice is deft and laconic as ever, the dialogue demonstrating the clipped niceties and hostile undercurrents that would become a common thread, but the structure and subject matter are unlike her later works. It isn’t set in New England, for one, but in a sunny California suburb, where it chronicles the lives of half a dozen households, most of Which contain working families with young to teenage children. There is no clear protagonists, and the jumble of names can be hard to keep track of. Not a great deal happens until a sudden and shocking act of violence in the final pages, which feels largely like a contrivance of literary fiction at the time than something authentic to the story.

Hangsaman feels more like vintage Jackson. Common themes emerge here that would find homes in her later novels and stories: the mousey and troubled young woman, the cozy superficial camaraderie of women that betrays sharp angles beneath, the petty theft and intrusion on personal space. There is also a surreal fatalism from the book’s college age protagonist Natalie, which would find a much more impactful resolution in Hill House, The Lottery, and some of her other short stories.

These are still good books and worth reading for those who intend to explore Jackson’s broader body of work. But her final two novels reign supreme. It is a shame she died as young as she did, as all signs point to a writer who was continuing to hone her craft.

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.

The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson

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.