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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

Haunted Travels: North Bennington, Vermont: Shirley Jackson’s Hometown

Photo of Jennings Hall at Bennington College in North Bennington, Vermont, courtesy of J.W. Ockler.

America is a haunted country, and as we count down the days till Halloween, Monster Librarian plans to share some destinations for travelers looking to travel someplace special for the Halloween season.

North Bennington, Vermont might seem like a peaceful village, but it’s also where author Shirley Jackson, best known for her novel The Haunting of Hill House and her short story “The Lottery”, lived for most of her married life. Jackson’s husband, Stanley Hyman, was a professor at Bennington College, and it is speculated that the inspiration for Hill House is the Jennings Music Building on the Bennington College campus. In her book Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life biographer Ruth Franklin suggests that the Everett Mansion near Old Bennington is a better candidate, but two creepy, potentially haunted buildings in the same area means she could have been inspired by both. This article from Vermont news station NBC5 has some great photos of Jennings Music Building matched to quotes from The Haunting of Hill House, in case your only option for travel is via armchair.

There’s also a story that Jackson based the town square, where a truly monstrous community ritual occurs, in “The Lottery” on Lincoln Square in North Bennington. According to her, while walking through the square on her way home from the post office, she had the idea for the story and immediately wrote it down. The Fund for North Bennington quotes Jackson’s writing to the San Francisco Chronicle about the story. Jackson writes:

Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.

J.W. Ockler has written a little about both locations here.

Jonah Daniell has written up a walking tour of Jackson-related locations for Literary Bennington: in addition to visiting Jennings Hall and Lincoln Square, Jackson and her family lived in a house at 12 Prospect Street at first and later bought a house at 66 Main Street. Both of these are now private residences. Powers Market, where Jackson did her shopping, is still there, and if you visit the library, you can see a cat statue she used to own. For such a noted writer, the town where she lived and wrote hasn’t done much to recognize her, although recently the local literary festival was renamed for her and the date moved to June 27, the date of the events in “The Lottery.” If you’re a Jackson fan and in or near Vermont, put North Bennington, Vermont on your bucket list.

Posted on October 1, 2021 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.