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 Stories of John Cheever - John Cheever

It had been over a decade since I’d last read Cheever, and my exposure to him before now was exclusively through his novels. I recalled enjoying them, but my memory was vague. Mostly I recalled images of upper crust New England, antiquated blue bloods who drifted into upper midle class suburbia in the first half of the 20th century. I expected much the same from his short stories, and thought this an interesting counterpoint to the last book I read, which collected the stories of Flannery O’Connor, another American writer with a gift for capturing the soul of her region of that vast and multicameral country.

My first impression wasn’t wrong, but it was incomplete. The first half of The Stories of John Cheever is set principally in New England, and concerns either members of old stock New England families, with their beach houses and servant staff, or their modern suburban equivalents. However, the bulk of the stories in the second half take place in Rome, and focus more on America as an identity than a place.

This surprised me, but what surprised me more than the shift in location was his occasional dip into other literary conventions beyond what I would call—for lack of a better term and due to a dislike of the term “literary fiction”—modern realism, the sort of stories in which the author plumbs the depths of their characters’ minds as they go about their largely plotless lives, culminating in some sort of epiphany. There are stories like The Enormous Radio, which one could argue is science fiction, but is more a satire than anything; dark hints of fantasy in such stories as Torch Song and The Music Teacher, which throw an ominous, otherworldly cast on certain characters without directly commiting to supernatural occurrences; and bouts of absurdism, best highlighted by the Death of Justina—my favorite story in the collection, in which the dispirited narrator waxes in pompous prose about his unfulfilling job, and is forced to carry his wife’s cousin’s body to a neighboring street in order for the coroner to accept her, as the narrator’s house is not zoned for death and dying is strictly forbidden.

Cheever varies his style to match the tone of his story, adopting different narrative voices in first and third person, but there remains a distinct “Cheeverness” throughout, an erudition and fondness for building sentences or metaphors like great Jenga Towers, their tottering precarity underscoring the deftness with which they were constructed. Reading the collection has inspired me to revisit the novels I haven’t read in some time.

Quatre Contes de Prosper Mérimée - Prosper Mérimée

Prosper Mérimée was an interesting dude. Throughout his life, he was, among other things, an archeologist, a historian, a government appointed inspector of French historical monuments for thirty years, an advisor to Emperor Napoleon III, a Senator, and a translator of Russian literature. He spearheaded the restoration of Notre-Dame catherdral, discovered and preserved one of the greatest pieces of medieval tapestry currently known, founded Paris’ Musée national du Moyen Âge (still in operation today), and created the seminal french translation of several of Russia’s greatest writers, including Pushkin and Gogol.

In addition to these many roles, he was also a writer. Though his name has been largely forgotten outside of literary circles, during his life he rivaled Victor hugo for prominenc,e and counted among France’s most popular writers. He became famous for his unadormed style, almost proto-Hemingwayan in its plainspoken precision and focus on detail over imagery. His best-remembered work is probably Carmen, though unfortunately for his posterity it is known mainly from the opera by Georges Bizet. Or at least, this is my impression; it's possible that in France he remains a household name.

The stories included in Quatre Contes are a mixture of adventure and romanticism. The first story is set in Corsica and paints it as a wild and lawless backwoods where honor is more important than everything else, even family. The second story recounts a slave-selling African's unfortunate capture by and escape from a slave ship. This one was the strongest of the four, and contained some bits of biting irony against the high-minded slavers, who considered the smallest concessions to basic decency, such as giving slaves an hour above deck a day, as signs of their benevolence. The third story was a war story, and somewhat disjointed. The last was actually a translation of a story by Pushkin, bu the editor felt its elegant style merited inclusion. All were told in an engaging and plainspoken style that I certainly appreciated, as despite the age of the stories they were much easier for a non-Francophone to grasp than other, more recent works I’ve encountered. I will certainly read other stories by him in the future.