Shirley Jackson's Disturbing Talent

Reading Shirley Jackson’s novels is like stepping into a dream. They may not be as opaque, mysterious and downright confounding as the stories of Robert Aickman, but they’re pretty close. In some strange alternative world, the two could be brother and sister. 

Her work is often lumped into the – totally misleading – category of Horror. As though she writes about vampires and midnight terrors. This seems to be based on her short story The Lottery and the film version of The Haunting of Hill House. That title was shortened to just The Haunting and with its creepy black & white photography and ghosts you only heard but never saw, it became a film that really was terrifying. 

But it wasn't really Shirley Jackson.

I think that's because she's less concerned with straightforward frights than with digging deep into troubled minds, and way beyond the point where we can shrug it off and forget where we've been taken. Hangsaman follows a young female college student slipping into insanity. We Have Always Lived in the Castle describes the life of the survivors of a family who were poisoned by their daughter, through the eyes of her more than equally disturbed sister. The Road Through the Wall unpicks racism and middle-class snobbery. And The Sundial watches the most appallingly arrogant, entitled family prepare for the End of the World – which they are convinced, by virtue of their wealth and social position, they will most assuredly survive.

None of them are comfortable reads. (Although The Sundial is often - strangely - laugh-out-loud funny.) None of them offer easy solutions. Good rarely triumphs. Life lessons are most definitely not learned. They’re examinations of cruel, selfish societies with no interest in, or regard for, outsiders. Twin Peaks without the surrealism or comforting wackiness. *

I have to say I prefer her short stories. They’re equally unsettling but, by virtue of the market she was writing for – magazines in the 1950s – much more focussed on a brisk, readable narrative. (Which I know says more about me than her.) But I can’t deny the power of her novels. Or her commitment to showing us a world we may not want to admit exists but can’t, if we’re honest, deny often does.

 

 

 * I am, it should be noted, a HUGE fan of Twin Peaks. But its off-the-wall nuttiness does often offer a comforting safety valve.