The Sundial

The Sundial by Shirley Jackson (1958)

The Halloran family is gathered together for a funeral - poor Lionel, apparently pushed down the stairs by his mother, Mrs. Halloran. While they are gathered, eccentric Aunt Fanny receives a communication from her dead father, warning the family that the world is going to end and only they will be saved. They must remain in the house together to await the apocalypse.

I didn't actually know what this book was going to be about, but luckily I am unbothered by reading about people hoarding food and supplies for their isolation period at home while it is happening all around me in real life. It is never a bad time for a Shirley Jackson novel.

Honestly, the matriarch of the family murdering her own son became quite beside the point, but lent a lot of dark humor to the story. Lionel's widow and daughter brought it up a lot at first, but then everyone became consumed by the dead Mr. Halloran's prophecy. Everyone had to decide whether or not they were on board with the plan to hunker down and wait for the world to end, and most of the family went along with it. They also had some hangers-on who weren't family - Essex, who had been hired to catalog the library but who the family ended up treating as a general servant and source of advice. A late arrival known only as "the captain" was the only other male aside from Essex and the unwell Mr. Halloran who kept to his wheelchair and seemed very confused most of the time. This is important because after the apocalypse this group would need to repopulate the world and there were more ladies than gentlemen so there was a bit of competition for attention.

The subject is dark, but like I said it was pretty funny too. People just outwardly insulted each other in a fairly carefree way, and there was a good deal of ridiculous melodrama. It was slightly creepy and ominous and enough was left open to maintain an air of mystery. I thought it was great - I continue to love Shirley Jackson's work more and more.

The Lottery and Other Stories

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson (1949)

Although I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle and the short story "The Lottery" when I was a teenager, it is only recently that I've become somewhat of a die-hard Shirley Jackson fan. I even read a biography about her a couple of years ago. So this year I decided to revisit "The Lottery" and read some of her other short stories as well.

The stories are divided into four sections. In the first section, most of the stories are about someone taking liberties in someone else's home. For instance, in "Like Mother Used To Make," a meticulous man has prepared dinner to share with his neighbor, and while they're eating someone enters their building to visit his neighbor. She ushers him into the apartment, inviting him to join them, and then pretends as though it's her own apartment and she has cooked the meal. The man who actually lives there, is left to go to his neighbor's messy, disordered apartment and stay there until her friend leaves and he can return to his place.

The second part seems to be about propriety and convention, and the way people in communities judge each other and their behavior. A couple of them were about race and I'm sorry to say that things haven't changed as much as they should have between the present day and time in which the stories were written. "After You, My Dear Alphonse" begins with a woman's young son bringing a friend home for lunch. The friend is black, and the woman keeps making assumptions about him and his family. She asks questions and seems surprised at the answers, like when she learns that his mother doesn't have a job. Her own son points out that she herself doesn't have a job, so why would Boyd's mother? She then assumes that he has lots of brothers and sisters. It culminates with the woman trying to give the boy some of their old clothes, and when he says that they have plenty of clothes, she gets angry and points out that "many little boys like you" would be grateful for the offer.

The theme of the third section is less clear to me, but the stories contain disorientation or unease or minor slights against others. I can't pick a favorite from this section, but I think I was most struck by "Seven Types of Ambiguity," in which a couple visits a bookstore hoping to buy large quantities of books, sets of books, presumably more for decorating than reading. While they're there, a boy comes in to spend time reading a book that he comes in for every day but hasn't been able to buy. Before they leave, the couple add that book to their purchase.

The final section ends with "The Lottery," but also contains several other stories about fear or being trapped. (Honestly, it's an interesting but difficult exercise to look at groups of stories and try to coax out the common thread.) In "Pillar of Salt" a young woman looks forward to vacation in New York with her husband and enjoys it for a while, until they find a disembodied leg. The incident casts a pall over everything, and the woman comes a bit unmoored, suddenly afraid of everything around her until one day she can't even manage to cross the street by herself and ends up calling her husband to come get her. Now that I think of it, the stories in this section all start out with a fairly everyday vibe and then take an unexpectedly dark turn.

"The Lottery" is the story Jackson is undoubtedly most famous for, but stands out from the other stories in the book in that it takes place in a kind of dystopian village and the others are more firmly rooted in our own society. But some of the themes are the same - societal norms, traditions, the expectation to conform. Don't go into this book thinking the stories will all be like this one, but there are definitely some common threads. There were only a couple of stories in the collection that left me feeling like I had no idea what they were getting at, and I imagine that's my own shortcoming, not Jackson's. Mostly, I found a lot to think about, particular in the ways our culture has changed, and how it has stayed the same, since Jackson's time. I'm very glad to have finally read this collection.

This book is part of my 2018 TBR Pile Challenge. It's actually one of my alternates, though now I don't know why it wasn't on my main list. It also feels like I shouldn't be reading my alternates before I've even tried reading all of my regular list, but this is just what I felt like reading at the time. Plus, somehow I managed to put a lot of long books on the list, and I wanted something shorter to read. At any rate, the challenge is going very well so far. Check the page I linked to above to see my whole list, and links to posts about the books I've read so far.

Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin (2016)

Shockingly, I have finished a 500-page biography about Shirley Jackson. Biography is a category on my 2017 Personal Reading Challenge because in theory I'd like to know more about the lives of famous and important people. I've read a few biographies in the past that I really liked, such as The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll and Personal History by Katherine Graham, and a couple about Eleanor Roosevelt and Marilyn Monroe, and I think that is the sum total of biographies that I've read in my life. I liked all of those but somehow I still find biographies too daunting to read. I heard about this Shirley Jackson biography when it came out in the fall and was intrigued, because I loved both The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but didn't actually think I'd read it until I impulsively picked it up one day.

As it turns out, even at 500 pages this wasn't difficult. I found Franklin's style totally accessible and enjoyed reading about Jackson's life and career. The chapters coordinated with time periods, in most cases the period of writing and publication of a book. Sometimes there was brief discussion of something that hadn't happened yet chronologically, and that was confusing because I had a hard time keeping the timeline straight. But that's my only criticism. Some Goodreads readers didn't like the amount of information they saw as peripheral to her life, such as family history covered at the beginning as it related to architecture in California, but I actually found that all pretty interesting and it did come up later so it made sense to me. Perhaps there was a bit too much discussion of Jackson's husband's work for my taste, but that might be because I didn't really understand it. Had his research been on a topic that I was more interested in, I definitely would have liked reading about it. But most of this peripheral information provided a context that I enjoyed because I had a better understanding of this particular era.

Jackson's relationship with her husband, Stanley Hyman, was fascinating but sad. They seemed perfect for each other in many ways, but Hyman was a chronic womanizer who remained more interested in his classes (and his young female students) than his family. They had four children together and Jackson identified both as a housewife and a writer. Her emotional struggles were partly, though I imagine not entirely, due to her husband's infidelity and although she considered leaving him, she never did. Franklin was able to gather a lot about Jackson's thoughts and feelings as she was a regular letter-writer throughout her life which are a trove of information.

Because of the time period (roughly 1930s-1960s) I was very interested in some of the social issues of the time. For instance, Stanley Hyman was Jewish and the couple faced a great deal of opposition to their marriage. They were pretty socially progressive for their time, closely befriend the African-American writer Ralph Ellison, and they also counted a couple of gay men among their friends. There's speculation that the character Theodora from The Haunting of Hill House is a lesbian, and that is pretty much confirmed here, Franklin revealing that Theodora was written as a lesbian in an early draft of the novel. Interestingly, Jackson wrote several lesbian characters but also found the idea of lesbianism a bit horrifying. Franklin points out that this was typical of people in her era and class, but I found it an interesting and confusing dichotomy.

There's so much more I'd love to talk about, but this is getting long and I've had to greatly reduce my screen time this week because of an eye issue. So I'll just wrap up by saying how glad I am that I took the plunge into this somewhat lengthy but fascinating book about an author I just haven't read enough of. I want to read more of her short stories and her novel The Sundial. If you're interested in Shirley Jackson, or just enjoy a good biography, I highly recommend this book.

The Haunting of Hill House

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)

A strange house sits nestled in the hills outside of a town called Hillsdale. Rumors of its sinister history have caught the attention of a Dr. Montague who rents out the house in hopes of scientifically studying the phenomena. He carefully chooses guests to accompany him, including a relation of the family who own the house. At first it seems like a lark, and the guests all spend time frolicking around and getting to know each other, but soon they begin having experiences they cannot explain away, and their stay turns from fun to terrifying.

Considered a classic in haunted house literature, Jackson's novel contains all the best elements of success: an imposing structure with a confusing layout, a history of mysterious deaths in the original family, unexplained occurrences, standoffish townspeople, and characters who might not be quite healthy mentally.

It is this psychological element that is most powerful in any horror story, and here it was used to its best advantage. The central character is Eleanor, a 32-year-old woman who has spent the last 11 years taking care of her sick mother. Her character is introduced with this statement: "The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister." Then, in a restaurant when Eleanor observes a small girl refusing to drink out of a cup that's not the one she uses at home: "Don't do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again; don't do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, dimpling, wholly comprehending smile, and shook her head stubbornly at the glass. Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl."

This scene was very telling. Eleanor is trapped in her narrow little life and jumps at the chance to escape it to visit Hill House. Unfortunately, her desperation makes her particularly vulnerable to the personalities and forces around her there. She quickly forms a friendship with Theodora, the other young woman who has been invited, but their relationship becomes troubled as the story progresses, partly due to the attractive young Luke who Eleanor seems fond of. Her growing insecurities and the increasingly unnerving events at the house converge upon her to her detriment. Her character was delightfully complex, simultaneously irritating and sympathetic.

Although I didn't love The Haunting of Hill House as much as We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I still found it an excellent creepy tale and will certainly try more of Shirley Jackson's books in the future.  I should also mention how much I like this particular edition, with the orange and black cover and pages edged in black. I couldn't get through Guillermo Del Toro's series introduction unfortunately, but thought the other introduction by Laura Miller to be quite interesting (but read it after reading the book because there are spoilers.) If you like creepy or psychological stories, definitely give this one a try!

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (1962)

Mary Katherine Blackwood and her sister Constance live alone in their family's house. The rest of the family is dead. Mary Katherine, also called Merricat, narrates the strange story of their lives and how they came to be living by themselves, outcasts shunned by the villagers. It's a dark and strange story, told by a narrator who is obviously a bit off her rocker.

The plot is best revealed in Jackson's skillful way so I won't talk much about it here. The best thing about it is the creepy, gothic atmosphere. Merricat's eccentricity adds a great deal because we know she's not quite right but are dependent upon her to tell the story. She is a girl of ritual and superstition, going to town only on certain days, burying objects in the yard and nailing books to trees to ward off...I'm not even sure what. She also keeps saying she is not allowed to do certain things, but it's unclear why or who is not allowing her to do them.

Mary Katherine and Constance's relationship is strange and co-dependent. Constance never ever lets herself be seen by anyone from the village, although she seems a bit more down-to-earth than Mary Katherine. They are weirdly close, regularly telling each other how much they love each other and how happy they are. It's as though they just want to remain together, isolated from the world, for the rest of their lives. But Constance seems like she'd be happy to rejoin the world if it weren't for her vaguely-threatening sister. Creepy.

Every once in a while I'll read a book and desperately wish that I had written it, and this is one of those books. I can't explain why, except that it just the perfect combination of big old house, family secrets, sinister children, and mental illness. Oh, and a cat. Kind of a creepy cat, now that I think about it. Anyhow, it has all my favorite elements of a good story (lacking only a stern governess, which here would ruin the story.) I also wish I had read this for a book group, because I'd really like to discuss it with someone, particularly those bits that would be spoilers if I wrote about them here.

All around an excellent book. Have you read it? It's only about 150 pages, so it doesn't take long at all, and is absolutely worth it!