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Book Review: When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson edited by Ellen Datlow

When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson edited by Ellen Datlow

Titan Books, 2021

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1789097153

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

Shirley Jackson couldn’t have known the impact her writing would have on the horror genre, speculative fiction, and literature in general: she was writing to pay the bills. Yet her work has resonated with readers and writers for both its depictions of domesticity, such as her fictionalized memoir, Life Among the Savages, and of the uncanny, seen in short stories like “The Lottery” and her most famous novels, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (and sometimes both together). In When Things Get Dark, well-known anthology editor Ellen Datlow has collected tales by talented writers of horror, the uncanny, and the weird, inspired by Shirley Jackson’s work.

A number of stories take place within suburbia, with the uncanny just beneath a placid surface. Laird Barron’s “Tiptoe” focuses on uneasy family dynamics and the necessity of keeping up appearances, and “For Sale By Owner” by Elizabeth Hand, is a meandering story about three elderly women with a habit of breaking into empty summer houses who hold a sleepover in an empty, beautiful old house, which turns out to be a disorienting and disturbing experience. In Richard Kadrey’s “A Trip to Paris”, a nod to We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a recent widow planning her escape from her mundane life has her nefarious actions revealed by a stubborn, growing patch of mold on her wall, while Jeffrey Ford’s “The Door in the Fence” documents the strange and surprising changes in the narrator’s next door neighbor after her husband dies.

Some stories take direct inspiration from Jackson’s work, such as Carmen Maria Machado’s “A Hundred Miles and a Mile”, which references the “cup of stars” from The Haunting of Hill House, and stories such as “Quiet Dead Things” by Cassandra Khaw and “Hag” by Benjamin Percy that describe insular communities and their deadly rituals like the one in “The Lottery”.

With others, it’s sometimes hard to see the connection, although the stories are interesting. In Seanan McGuire’s dark fairytale “In the Deep Woods; The Light is Different There”, a woman escaping an abusive husband retreats to her family’s lake house, where she discovers the caretakers are not what they seem. John Langan produces a compelling, surreal tale of family, the occult, and mythological creatures in “Something Like Living Creatures”. In the dread-inducing “Money of the Dead”, Karen Heuler addresses the problems with resurrection and obsessive love; Joyce Carol Oates’ “Take Me, I Am Free” is a bleak, heartbreaking story about a child whose angry mother attempts to throw her away; in Josh Malerman’s dystopian “Special Meal”, a young girl discovers the difficulties, and consequences, of hiding knowledge. Genevieve Valentine’s “Sooner or Later, Your Wife Will Drive Home” is a cleverly constructed story about smart women in unlucky situations they can’t escape, something Jackson could certainly relate to. There were a few stories that didn’t hit the mark: “Funeral Birds” petered out at the end, “Refinery Road” and “The Party” left me confused, and “Pear of Anguish” didn’t seem to fit the theme or mood of the anthology.

While there are many excellent stories, the three that stood out to me were the previously mentioned “Tiptoe”; “Take Me, I Am Free”, a bleak, heartbreaking story about a child whose angry mother attempts to give her away; and Kelly Link’s “Skinder’s Veil”, a strange tale about a graduate student struggling with writing his dissertation who takes a housesitting job in rural Vermont, with the only rules being that anyone knocking at the back door must be invited in, but the front door should never be opened. Those who come to the back door are an unusual bunch, and the consequences of that summer are significant for him.

It’s not necessary to be a fan of Shirley Jackson to enjoy this book, but it does help, especially with Machado’s story, which depends on context from The Haunting of Hill House. If you do pick up When Things Get Dark without having read Jackson first, you will want to by the time you finish. Recommended.

Contains: self-harm, torture, suicide, murder

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on October 28, 2021 by Kirsten, Reply

Interview: Lisa Kroger and Melaine R. Anderson, Authors of Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

I’m so pleased that our reviewer David Simms had the opportunity to meet and interview Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson, the authors of Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction. As a librarian, I am really happy to have a reference work that covers women who might not necessarily be in other reference volumes on horror writers. It often can be a puzzle simply to identify them!

Lisa is also a co-host of the bi-monthly horror podcast Know Fear.

Interview with Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson

David: This is such an important book. What prompted you to write it?

Lisa: I have my PhD in 18th Century British literature, with a focus on the Gothic writers. I suppose my interest began then, when I saw these spooky stories that were predominantly written by women. I have always loved horror, but the names that tend to be discussed are male: King, Poe, Lovecraft. I love them all, but I also wanted to have a discussion about the other giants in the field. I guess you could say that I wanted to write the history of horror, told only with the women writers. I wrote it with my coauthor, Melanie Anderson, who I met in graduate school. We quickly discovered a mutual love for horror and speculative fiction. The earliest seeds of this book started there, at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.

Melanie: Ever since graduate school, and including my first academic book, most of my scholarship has focused on the fiction of women writers, and in particular, supernatural fiction. When you think of Gothic or horror texts of American literature, men’s names come up quite a bit, but there were other voices in conversation with them. I wanted to share these women writers Lisa and I were finding with people who just love to read horror, or the supernatural, or the weird.

David: I’m embarrassed to have never heard of so many of these authors. You have placed these titles front and center to so many readers and writers. Which was your greatest find?

Lisa: The greatest and most frustrating was Eli Colter. We found her when reading through the old Weird Tales issues. Her short story “The Last Horror” is a great example of the “weird Western,” and it holds up even today. It’s an eerie, creepy tale. The problem with Colter is that there is very little known about her today. We had a hard time even finding biographical information on her–some places were still referring to her as “he.” But that is one of the purposes of this book: to reintroduce these women to a new set of readers.

Melanie: I agree with Lisa that Colter was probably our greatest find, and one of the more difficult ones because of lack of information. Many of the pulp writers felt mysterious to me because there was this impermanence to the work. Plus, they were focused on placing stories and not as personally visible. Another interesting find from the early pulp years was Gertrude Barrows Bennett, not because she was completely unknown, though her work had fallen out of print at times, but because she was known primarily under her pen name Francis Stevens. When we think about the beginnings of weird fiction, we have a very male picture in our minds, but that can be expanded a bit.

David: Which of these stories has resonated the strongest with you? How about the lives of the writer?

Lisa: I will always love Shirley Jackson, and I think that her story still resonates with me. She was a brilliant writer, but I think her talents weren’t always recognized. She wrote a few domestic stories, about her time raising her children. There seems to be this tension between what was expected of her as a mother and a professor’s wife and what was expected of her as a writer. It was as if she had two lives that couldn’t co-exist. A story that’s often told of her is when she was in the hospital having one of her children, and the nurse was taking her information at the hospital. The woman asked Shirley Jackson what her occupation was, and Jackson told her she was a writer. The nurse looked perplexed and said, “I’ll just put down housewife.” That is amazing to me! This is the author of The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, for goodness sake. But I think she resonates with me because I see Jackson as a genius, yet the world around her sometimes didn’t recognize it, and that was probably solely because of her gender. I’m going on a tangent here, and I certainly don’t consider myself on Jackson’s level, but her story resonates with me. I think male writers with less talent have been called a genius when she was often overlooked.

Melanie: It’s hard to choose one woman, but Margery Lawrence’s independence fascinated me. I was familiar with her name from reading occult detective fiction of the early twentieth century. I didn’t, however, know about her interest in the occult, attendance at seances, and ghost hunting activities. While she did marry, she published an article titled “I Don’t Want to be a Mother” in 1929 in Cosmopolitan, and she was not afraid to travel. I think we have this idea of how women of previous generations existed in the world, and women like Lawrence add to and change that traditional image.

David: Which story, or author, did you find most intriguing in your research?

Lisa: I love Margaret St. Clair. Read her stories “The Man Who Sold Ropes to the Gnoles” or “Horrer Howce,” which are so much fun and just well written overall. Plus, her life story is fascinating. Her research led her to basically practice a form of Wicca. She went from growing up in Kansas, the daughter of a politician, to living with her husband in California, spending her days gardening and learning about Wicca and writing about the occult. She just sounds like such a fascinating person.

Melanie: I also was intrigued with Margaret St. Clair. She was one of the first women pulp writers we learned about, and I’ve enjoyed reading her work. Dorothy Macardle was another of my favorites. I like a good haunted house book, and I was surprised I hadn’t heard of her book The Uninvited (also known as Uneasy Freehold). I think I discovered it through reading about the 1944 film adaptation. I find her melding of her knowledge of psychology with actual ghosts in a house to be fascinating. Most writers want to have it be one or the other, even if the end is ambiguous. But Macardle had ghosts that haunted people because of specific reactions to loss and seemed to want to emphasize the connection between hauntings and traumatic memories. Her life was fascinating as well. She was fiercely committed to her political views and to her writing.

David: Lisa, you’re also a writer. I hear you had a recent sale. Anything you can share about it?

Lisa: I have a short story coming out with Cemetery Dance, so look for that in a future issue. I have a few other projects up my sleeve, and I hope I can share some of that news soon.

David: With the uptick of amazing female horror writers, do you predict a resurgence of those written about in Monster, She Wrote?

Lisa: I hope so. But the women in our book are such a small percentage of the women writing horror and its related fields. There are so many more women writers to discover. I hope this book will just be a starting point. I want people to find new authors, but I also want people to be inspired to go and find authors they haven’t read, especially women, because there are so many out there.

David: Which writers do you find most fascinating in the current trend horror literature? Any favorite books?

Lisa: A personal favorite of mine is Carmen Maria Machado. Her Body and Other Parties blew me away when I read it. Every story in that collection is heartbreakingly good. I also love Lauren Beukes. I will read anything she writes.

David: You live in New Orleans, a mecca of gothic fiction. How inspiring do you find this setting for your own writing?

Lisa: I live just outside New Orleans, along the Gulf Coast. It is a Southern Gothic setting through and through. Just along my street, there are giant oak trees with gnarled limbs that hang over the paths, Spanish moss hanging low. There are literal swamps nearby with green water and gators. It’s a beautiful scene, but there’s a deadliness to that beauty, you know? If you’ve ever read Michael McDowell’s book The Elementals, then you know what I mean. That book could take place in my hometown. Plus, New Orleans has its own history and lore, steeped in vampires and ghosts. It’s one of the only places in the world where the “For Sale” signs will say if a house is haunted or not. It’s a selling point. Stories just seem to naturally form in this place, and it is infectious. It’s hard not to fall in love with storytelling in this place.

David: What’s next for you? Would you like to continue bringing to light more unsung heroines or delve deeper into your own fiction?

Lisa: I think I will always be looking for interesting women in history to uncover. I’m drawn to women’s stories, just like I’m drawn to women characters in fiction. I definitely want to explore more nonfiction, maybe a follow-up to Monster, She Wrote or some other aspect of history, but I also want to expand my fiction. I have some short stories I’m working on now. I also am interested in psychological horror, so I’ve been playing around with some novel ideas. I will always love anything to do with a cult, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I don’t write a cult story one day.

David: You’re well versed in so many areas of horror and speculative fiction. Do you have any recommendations for hidden gems in film, television shows, art, comics, etc?

Lisa: Women are the ones to watch in the horror genre. One movie I love is The Invitation, directed by Karyn Kusama. It is so well done. I am often surprised that more people haven’t seen it. Another creator I love is Phoebe Waller-Bridge. It’s not horror, but her television series Fleabag is two perfect seasons of storytelling. For graphic novels, I love the work of Emil Ferris and Emily Carroll. I don’t know if any of these really qualify as “hidden gems,” but I will always recommend their work.

Editor’s note: Check out our review of Monster, She Wrote here.

Posted on September 1, 2019 by Kirsten, Reply

Women In Horror Month: Supernatural Tales, Hidden No More

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Looking back at American supernatural tales of the 19th and 20th century, we can see that often the themes that they focused on revolved around women and children and the traditional roles they were expected to fill. On the surface, it may seem like that reinforces a conservative, patriarchal view of the world, but women who wrote these stories often used them to explore questions about sexuality, marriage, the domestic sphere, and the horror of confinement to the narrow expectations faced by women and girls.

Shirley Jackson’s “Afternoon in Linen”, is a textbook example of this (literally– it appears in my daughter’s language arts textbook). While it has no supernatural elements, we see a lot of tension between adult expectations of our protagonist Harriet, her own desires, and the boy there who also happens to be her classmate. In the story, Harriet’s grandmother and mother expect her to perform on the piano and recite her original poetry to visitors. Harriet does not want to either play the piano or share her personal thoughts with the visitors and insists she doesn’t know how. She can tell that the boy who arrived with the visitors, who is also a classmate, will mock her poetry to her peers. Pushed to the limit by her grandmother, Harriet claims she lied about writing the poem herself. She would rather disappoint the expectations of the adults wanting to show off her feminine talents than perform for them; and she would rather be seen as a liar than teased by her peers. Harriet’s self-determination and how the conflicting expectations of the people around her affect her behavior leave the reader unsettled, even though the story doesn’t hold the horror of The Haunting of Hill House.

It’s interesting that actually, many of the women who wrote supernatural stories are seen as “regional” or “realistic” authors, with their ghost and supernatural stories disregarded in favor of their better-known works. Edith Wharton, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, all of whom either appeared in my American lit textbook or were recommended reading, were never identified as writers of supernatural fiction there.

While supernatural tales often were written with women as the victims, sometimes they were also written with powerful women with agency in them. Women authors used the supernatural to explore anxieties about marriage, home, power, and the fragility of love and relationships. Under cover of the fantastic and unreal. they were able to strike deep into the emotional and psychological truths of women’s lives, while delivering a terrifying tale that those simply looking for entertainment could appreciate.

So many women wrote for newspapers and periodicals that have now crumbled to pieces that we may never know how many talented writers’ works were lost forever. Of those that remain, some are only available in out-of-print limited editions. Others, however, are available either free or cheap as ebooks (The Wind in the Rose-bush by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Tales of Men and Ghosts by Edith Wharton, for instance) You kind of have to know who you’re looking for to find the hidden supernatural tales that haven’t made it into textbooks or onto lists of recommended or required reading. I’ve written about some of them in the past, but there’s much to do to bring women writers of supernatural fiction to light.

Luckily, today, women don’t have to fight quite as hard to be recognized for their outstanding work in the horror genre. Today on Facebook, author Christopher Golden asked writers to name the people who had been supportive to them on their creative journey, and there were many women writers who responded, and even more who were named as mentors and friends. Of course there is still a long way to go in terms of representation, but that’s why we have Women in Horror Month– to bring attention to all the great creative women in the horror genre who make it come alive. I challenge you to pick out a book by a woman writer of horror this month that you haven’t read before, and read it. There’s so much good stuff out there that there’s really no reasonable excuse not to.

Note: This post owes much to Alfred Bendixen’s Haunted Women: The Best Supernatural Tales by American Women Writers. It is out of print but is available new and used at Amazon. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in sampling the supernatural stories of many of the women mentioned above.