I read the haunting of hill house and just finished we have always lived in the castle...
why is she popular again? these two books, the latter being marginally better, are pretty underwhelming, considering how big her name is in the pantheon of horror/gothic fiction?
What else have you read in the genre that you think compares favorably to those works?
I am legend is phenomenal, as well as any major Lovecraft story (or minor, the Outsider being my favorite of his). I've read a lot of King when I was younger, but I recently reread Salem's Lot and Pet Sematary, they were amazing, both are fantastic horror. There's also Poe, but that's pretty unfair comparison for most writers. Finally there's Ghost Story which I also thought was pretty great, though overrated in its own way, it's still surpasses both of Jackson's works that I've read.
What are your thoughts?
oh yeah, and I've of course read Dracula and Frankenstein, the former of course being a much more "gothic genre" novel.
SJ writes stories about psychological uncertainty, not le spooky stories.
>What are your thoughts?
I'm not a horror connoisseur, but to me Jackson is most enjoyable for the quality of the writing. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is pretty remarkable that way, and much has been made just of the opening paragraph, which to some does a superlative job in establishing mood and character.
>My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
Don't get me wrong, I love the intro paragraph, and the prose of the book is great, but her plots leave me a lot to be desired, and I don't her prose is good enough to carry the book alone, certainly nowhere near the level of Proust or Pynchon.
I think that's fair enough, but if you were coming to Jackson expecting Proust you might've been setting the bar a bit high.
I found the plot of WHALITC to be perfectly satisfactory, personally. I loved the book.
theres a lot of 8uried plot in castle, like marrys motive, the spider in the 8owl, or the very loosy implied possi8ility of constance 8eing alone the entire time. unlike in pynchon i find the prose plot and structure to 8e very sharp, which doesnt necessarily come from her minimalism. she has 8uilt very memora8le characters and a world i can still vividly picture, all of which goes for hill house. as
said, the main appeal is very different from lovecraft or king, more akin to aickman.
why are you typing like a homestuck character
The Lottery is a lot better though.
No it isn't.
It's not. But also it's impossible to fully appreciate it as a story from nearly 75 years ago that people have copied and diluted. It's also hard to appreciate the shock value of the time and place it came out of. It doesn't move us now the way it moved them back then enough where people canceled their New Yorker subscriptions.
The one thing I will say is We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a masterpiece and it really pushes the themes of The Lottery (us vs. the mob) to the next level.
There’s a really interesting essay Jackson wrote about the blowback she got from writing The Lottery. It’s included in some collected editions of her work that have her non-fiction in them.
Her short stories are pretty great
>Shirley Jackson
Who?
It’s not indicative of her oeuvre, but Hangsaman is a pretty cool book. One of the strangest I’ve ever read. Kind of like CitR but from a female perspective. She gets raped early on, says she’s not going to think about it, and it is never mentioned again. She meets a weird student, they go on adventures and at the end she says she going to grow up. It’s told from the first person perspective
Checking to see if posting is working for me again or not.
It's horror, Anon. (Or technically terror. Whatever.) The bar for good writing hasn't been set that high in the genre, so when someone with decent writing chops comes along it's noticeable. It's like how Raymond Chandler stands out in crime fiction. He was a good author, but writing in a traditionally crappy genre made the quality of his work stand out even more in comparison.
The best authors in the horror genre don't simply show you the ghost or whatever and say 'boo!" They deal more deeply with psychological themes, which is what Jackson was good at, though she was by no means the greatest horror writer in history.
Have you read any pre-1850s-ish horror fiction? That's typically where the higher quality stuff is hiding, though of course Poe is good as well.
I guess Poe is technically pre-1850, so let's say pre-1835 instead. I'm thinking specifically of works like The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer, Frankenstein, The Castle of Otranto, etc.