Books by Shirley Jackson

“I think she does a typically sensational job with atmosphere, and what it was like to be a woman at that time—the 1940s, coming into the 1950s, when there was a huge flux in gender roles following the upheaval of the second world war. It was a time when we saw a surge in multiple personality disorders in women because of the conflicting societal roles that were then coming to the fore, the deep schisms that appeared within women who could not fathom who they were now supposed to be. I think she captures that deep, deep anxiety and uncertainty that’s inherently gendered so well. Also, it’s a campus novel. That really appeals to me as well. The strange shift that can happen when people are confined to a condensed geographic location. I love Shirley Jackson’s later novels too, but I have huge affection for Hangsaman.” Read more...

Literary Horror Books

Sue Rainsford, Novelist

“This is where that line between Jackson’s reality and fiction became incredibly blurred. She was writing about her children, and giving them pseudonyms. She’s the narrator, and the extent to which she’s fictionalising herself or not is very much up for debate. I suppose the book is about the mythologies and fantasies that you end up living, when you live with children. When you interact with them all the time, you become absorbed into their worlds—an unreality which is as real as any other world. Shirley Jackson enjoys and relishes in the darkness of children.” Read more...

The Best Shirley Jackson Books

Joan Passey, Literary Scholar

“There’s a child who appears in her stories called Laurie—of course, Laurence Hyman is her son, who went on to edit this collection. These letters are from her teenage years all the way to the end of her life. There’s a letter to herself, about how alienating it is to be a writer. She reflects on the reception of her work that is really interesting, in terms of the history of women’s writing. She talks about her husband’s colleagues being in raptures as she reads from her newest novel for 30 minutes, and then the very next day she’s dismissed again as just the wife of Professor Hyman. So they tell us more about her, but also the ways in which women were forced to carve out space for themselves at this time, and how conscious she was of her reception—and how resistant to this idea that there’s a dichotomy between being a horror author and a mother and a wife.” Read more...

The Best Shirley Jackson Books

Joan Passey, Literary Scholar

“The Lottery is often considered one of the best American short stories of all time, and is taught in writing programmes all over the world. It’s about a small American community, which appears to be holding some kind of regular ballot. It’s just a normal part of their world. Everyone knows it’s going on. As a reader, you’re feeling very alienated by the mystery of this seemingly mundane thing. But as the story reaches its close, you begin to realise that what they are voting for is to stone a member of the community to death. I think it’s interrogating the idea of the status quo, of doing something simply because it’s tradition. And it’s a forerunner of films like The Wicker Man and Midsommar.” Read more...

The Best Shirley Jackson Books

Joan Passey, Literary Scholar

“The whole collection is great, but I really like ‘Home,’ because it’s so striking to have such solid ghosts. The other standout story in there is ‘All She Said Was Yes,’ which is fantastic. Shirley Jackson is brilliant.” Read more...

The Best Ghost Stories

Will Maclean, Novelist

“Like a lot of Jackson’s work, it’s about small communities in 20^th century America. It’s about a distrust of women. It follows a long literary tradition of women being accused of poisoning—this being the only disposal in a woman’s power in an otherwise oppressive society. And it’s about strange sisters. So you can see shades of Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic, though the supernatural in it isn’t as explicit, in fact you could argue there’s nothing supernatural in We Have Always Lived in the Castle at all. Instead it’s about a kind of strangeness.” Read more...

The Best Shirley Jackson Books

Joan Passey, Literary Scholar

“It’s a quintessential gothic novel. It’s very short, but packed with this dense prose and disorientating, multi-sensory experiences. As it unravels, you begin to wonder whether the house is haunted or is it actually something more like The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman—a narrative of mental illness, the fallibility of perception. Or is it that Eleanor has a kind of telekinetic ability where she’s creating these disturbances herself, and she’s the supernatural figure? It does all that in a very short span of time, and it toys with everything that we know about the haunted house.” Read more...

The Best Shirley Jackson Books

Joan Passey, Literary Scholar