‘Charles’ by Shirley Jackson

A story about narrators and viewpoints, and a story about children. I was a kid, maybe a tween- or teenager, when I found 75 Short Masterpieces in a used bookstore. I read ‘Charles’ and my world broke open. I felt pure shame, even though it wasn’t mine, and it wasn’t real. But it was mine, as I relived my memories of first grade—not kindergarten, I wasn’t retaining memories yet—and saw myself first as Laurie observing Charles, and then, against my will, as Charles. I haven’t reread this story, but I want it in my anthology so that I can, if I ever muster the courage.

First published in Mademoiselle in 1948. Collected in The Lottery and Other Stories, FSG, 1949; and in 75 Short Masterpieces: Stories from the World’s Literature, Bantam, 1983

‘Home’ by Shirley Jackson

There is a little hut in Newnham gardens, between the college and the Old Labs, sheltered by trees and shrubs, where one can, if so inclined, disappear. I used to sit there, on rainy days when it wasn’t too cold, to read stories; Shirley Jackson’s were my favourite. They went well with the gloomy atmosphere. It never stops raining in her short story ‘Home’, in which a young couple move into an old house in the country. The house itself isn’t haunted, but the road that leads to it might be, by a little child and an old woman, standing in the rain, demanding to go back, to go back, to go back…

First published in The Ladies Home Journal, August 1965. Collected in Just an Ordinary Day, Bantam Books 1997)

‘Afternoon in Linen’ by Shirley Jackson

If some authors write short stories which could be considered more like novels, Shirley Jackson writes short stories which can be considered more like flash fiction. They are sleek, slim and minimalistic. Yet somehow the characters manage to shift from the first impression the give off, that of stick figures, to full-bodied people into the lives of whom we get just a thin glimpse. ‘Afternoon in Linen’ captures the tension between children and adults, focusing on a girl and her grandmother during a social visit. Mrs. Lennon and Harriet are visited by Mrs. Kator and her little boy, Howard. As a reader, the story puzzles me. Mrs. Lennon pushes Harriet to show off her skills: play piano or read a poem written assumingly by herself. But Harriet recoils from each one of her grandma’s gentle pushes. “‘I didn’t write it’, she said. ‘I found it in a book and copied it and gave it to my old grandmother and said I wrote it’”. Of course, Harriet not only needs to perform for and in front of her grandmother. Howard, her schoolmate, also assesses Harriet’s performance. And the question remains, who does Harriet want to impress more and to what lengths she’s willing to go for that.

First published in The New Yorker, 27 August 1943, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Lottery and Other Stories, Farrar, Straus and Company, 1949. Can be listened to here, with an introduction by Kristen Roupenian

‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson

Written in 1948, read in 2015 by myself, ‘The Lottery’ rocked my world as a reader and writer. It is brutal. The narrative voice is chillingly calm, as if talking about doing the washing up, and then Jackson upends the reader’s world, by centering on the everyday potential of human cruelty. The story is set in a small, seemingly idyllic village where the residents gather for an annual lottery. The so-called winner is stoned to death by the other villagers as a ritualistic sacrifice.

‘The Lottery’ was an influence on the writing of the short story ‘Ultramarine’, in my story collection of that name.

First published in The New Yorker in June 1948 and available online to subscribers here. Widely collected, including in The Lottery and Other Stories, Penguin 2009

‘Like Mother Used to Make’ by Shirley Jackson

This was first published in a collection with the more famous ‘The Lottery’, and to my mind is more indicative of Jackson’s usual style: that of a deep-seated, but creeping rather than overt, weirdness that leaks into everyday life. It also features the recurring character, James Harris, which appeals to my taste for closed worlds.

The story concerns a man who is inviting his neighbour to dinner. David is very conscious of his material surroundings. He takes a very active pleasure in the appearance of his apartment, “the most comfortable home he had ever had,” and over his successes in finding exactly the furnishings he wanted. There are some things he still wants, and he has had to choose between getting a particular kind of vase, and continuing to buy the silverware he has “[g]radually, tenderly” been buying. He is troubled by the falling plaster in his bedroom that “no power on earth” could make less noticeable, but his concern is easily balanced by the comforts and reassurances of his “warm, fine home.” His less-organised neighbour, Marcia, is to be his guest for dinner. The exact nature of their relationship is not exactly clear; he has a key to her apartment for practical reasons (like letting in the laundry-man) and she has none to his, but when he leaves a note for her, he signs it ‘D’, suggesting long familiarity. Her apartment very nearly distresses him because it is so untidy.

Marcia, when she arrives, is disruptive in every way—loud, late, informal, wearing a dirty coat, and calling him “Davie”—but he enjoys her great appreciation of his home, the dinner, and the table-settings. She seems to show signs of coveting aspects of David’s approach to life—“Someone should teach me, I guess”—and then the fatal disruption happens.

Jackson excels in a sort of inevitable terribleness that dominates on arrival, so that characters have just registered the reality when it is too late to do anything about it. Sometimes (as in ‘Pillar of Salt’) it is their environment that turns against them, but here it is people who shift without warning and inexorably from the background to the foreground. Marcia’s colleague, James Harris, calls to see her, and she invites him into David’s home. Instantly, David’s possession of his home is undermined by the very means by which he created its security and comfort, and through which he expresses not only his personality, but his agency. Within a few apparently innocuous lines of social chit-chat, this agency is excised, and David’s position echoes that of Mrs Hart in ‘Men with Their Big Shoes’, who “realized with a sudden unalterable conviction that she was lost”.

Published in The Lottery and Other Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1949; now in a Penguin Modern Classics edition, 2009

‘The Tooth’ by Shirley Jackson

Selected by Dyani Sheppard

Shirley Jackson pulls the reader into her suburban worlds where everything is almost normal, but just a touch off kilter. I found it is this subtlety is so unsettling and she is a master of creating dark stories with a lingering unease. I first read her classic We Have Always Lived in the Castle and felt how setting her stories in the recent past, somewhere vaguely familiar but just out of reach, works so well in disarming the reader. In ‘The Tooth’ we meet Clara Spencer as she is in the haze of a bad toothache, travelling in the dead of night to New York to visit the dentist. She is joined part way through the journey by a mysterious stranger (a phantom figure that seems to me to float in from Jackson’s other story ‘The Daemon Lover’). Clara’s confusion increases as the pain, codeine and whisky numbs her reality. She slips in and out of sleep and the story itself gets increasingly disorientating. We follow Clara as she is hauled back and forth from the bus to diners to the back of taxis and waiting rooms, an endless cycle of temporary spaces where she is not allowed to rest. I felt my frustration building as Clara seems isolated in her journey, the mundane routines of the world continuing maddeningly oblivious to her plight.

First published in the Hudson Review, 1949, collected in The Lottery and Other Stories, Farrar, Straus, 1949

‘Like Mother Used to Make’ by Shirley Jackson

Many of Shirley Jackson’s stories would fit just as well in horror anthologies as literary collections. Even in a novel called The Haunting of Hill House it’s hard to say for sure that anything supernatural has really happened.

James Harris, a recurring character in several short stories, might be the devil – or perhaps we just need to accept that ordinary men can also be controlling – and gleefully, pettily wicked.

In this story, David, a pernickety young man, has his neighbour Marcia over for dinner in his neat little apartment. He doesn’t earn much but what he does have goes on silver cutlery and other small things that make bedsit life tolerable. Then Marcia’s colleague, Mr Harris, shows up. Without explanation, Marcia begins to act as if David’s flat is hers, and as if she has cooked the gourmet dinner on the table. David, trapped in a game of manners, plays along:

Eventually, he leaves his own flat, defeated:

“He went down the hall and let himself into Marcia’s apartment, the piano was still awry, the papers were still on the floor, the laundry scattered, the bed unmade. David sat down on the bed and looked around. It was cold, it was dirty, and as he thought miserably of his own warm home he heard faintly down the hall the sound of laughter and the scrape of a chair being moved. Then, still faintly, the sound of his radio. Wearily, David leaned over and picked up a paper from the floor, and then he began to gather them up one by one.”

First published in The Lottery and Other Stories, 1949

‘The Summer People’ by Shirley Jackson

My first Shirley Jackson story was ‘The Lottery’, with the added magic of hearing the author’s own audio recording of it (here). There are so many of her stories I could have included here but I’ve picked ‘The Summer People’.

Mr and Mrs Allison, “city people”, spend every winter looking forward to staying in their summer cottage, and every autumn they’re sorry to leave. This year, with nothing much to get back to New York for, they decide to stay on. The locals, on whom they depend for groceries and fuel, are not encouraging, and repeatedly remind the Allisons that Labor Day is when people leave. They’re going to give it a try though. “Never know till you try.” This story is a brilliant example of Jackson’s writing about small communities and outsiders, and her engineering of creeping dread.

First published in Charm, September 1950. Collected in Dark Tales, Penguin Classics, 2016

‘Pillar of Salt’ by Shirley Jackson

In my early twenties I made a bad decision: I followed a boyfriend to New York, a city where I had no job and almost no friends, from London, where things had sort of started happening for me. I assumed, at 22, that things happen everywhere, so the plan seemed faultless. What followed was a time so bad that I developed a sort of cottonmouth when I tried to articulate the pain. In ‘Pillar of Salt’ a couple visit Manhattan from their quiet New Hampshire town, and wife Margaret begins to experience bouts of hallucinatory anxiety as she clashes with the city, seeing danger and collapse (sometimes real, sometimes imagined) atop balconies, on shorelines, and in the throes of chic parties. Of course, her husband experiences none of this.

It’s got Jackson’s trademark grotesquerie, and her unmooring of characters from the realities in which they’ve become comfortable. But it’s also a fuck you to the idea that a place’s inherent ‘badness’ requires explanation. There are notes of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ in it, but also something more terrifying: that the claustrophobia and madness of a locked room like Gilman’s might bleed into the vastness of The Greatest City In The World™.

I wish I’d read ‘Pillar Of Salt’ two weeks into my time in New York, rather than many years after I’d started the exhausting process of re-emigrating to the UK. But the way in which fiction can step in for you, to unburden you of the responsibility to rationalise your interiority, is something timeless. And that’s nice.

First published in Mademoiselle, 1948, collected in The Lottery and Other Stories, Penguin 1967

‘The Witch’ by Shirley Jackson

I have a very strange and uncomfortable relationship with Jackson, mainly because I think she’s excellent, but I do not want to deal with what she is revealing about human nature. I like ‘The Witch’ so much because it is, on the surface, a very funny story, but of course it reveals something more about human nature and our childlike glee for horror and our fascination with gore and ghost stories, and our capability for great cruelty. In it a little boy meets a man on the train who tells him a horrible story, to the little boy’s delight, and his distracted mother’s annoyance. It is very short, and Jackson writes with such a deft touch you do not notice that the dark has crept in.

First published in 1948 and collected in The Lottery and Other Stories, Penguin 1967. Also available as a Penguin Modern Classic for Kindle, 2014

‘The Daemon Lover’ by Shirley Jackson

A story for October

For All Hallow’s Eve and the shift to the darker side of the year, I choose Shirley Jackson. Her work is always unsettling, with the edges of this world blurred with the supernatural. In ‘The Daemon Lover,’ a woman searches the city for her fiancé, and can’t find him anywhere. It’s the day of their wedding, and as she grows more frantic and isolated, the story turns nightmarish: she travels to his apartment and finds his name on none of the mailboxes, the ones that may know him don’t remember him leaving, various shop owners’ faces rise up, their voices circling her. I’ve subsequently read that this story has in it Jackson’s comment about society’s expectation on women to marry but what I love in it is the invisible figure haunting every page, barely glimpsed, then eventually lost.

Collected in The Lottery and Other Stories, Farrar, Straus and Company, 1949, republished by Penguin Classics in 2009. The story can be read here

‘One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts’ by Shirley Jackson

Now there’s even a biopic about her (haven’t seen it), and I think Shirley Jackson is pretty widely recognised as a brilliant, major writer. But for a long time, it seemed like she was ‘The Lottery’ and that was about it. Of course, ‘The Lottery’ is a great, great story and deserves all the huzzahs it gets. I could have included that one here, too, and been stoned to death a happy man. But just to be interesting (“Too late!” you moan) may I offer for your consideration ‘One Ordinary Day…’.

It’s short, it’s sweet, it’s clever, it’s funny, it’s profound and just a little bit disturbing… all the things that Jackson was so good at stirring together. It’s only about the origin of good and evil in the world – kind of. Read ‘The Lottery’ if you’ve never done so, by all means (and drop a copy of The Haunting of Hill House into your shopping basket while you’re at it.) But sit back and enjoy the Jacksonian whimsy of ‘One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts’.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1955, and collected in Jackson’s (posthumous) Just an Ordinary Day, Bantam, 1996

‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson

Published in the New Yorker in 1948, The Lottery has long been considered the best short story of all time. A small American town performs an annual ritual of running a lottery, where its inhabitants draw lots to see which one will be sacrificed to a death by stoning. Jackson is so skilful in placing the unimaginable firmly in realism, that when first published, some readers were utterly convinced and consequently horrified that this was an actual event in a real town. Truly one of the best short stories I have ever read it makes for tense and deeply unnerving read.

First published in The New Yorker in June 1948 and available online to subscribers here. Widely collected, including in The Lottery and Other Stories, Penguin 2009

‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson

I stumbled across this one fairly recently and was unprepared for the sucker punch it delivered. I admire the queasiness of its atmosphere and the coolness with which the violence is handled. Like the Kafka and the O’Connor stories, this one made me gasp out loud. As a reader I am drawn to tenderness and restraint in a writer’s prose style. If a story can make me gasp out loud with shock at an action or a turn of events that is surprising yet inevitable and even signalled from the start, all the better.

First published in The New Yorker in June 1948 and available online to subscribers here. Widely collected, including in The Lottery and Other Stories, Penguin 2009