Alone and Unobserved

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 our family is dead.

—Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, 1962

I’ve never mentioned Shirley Jackson on this blog. I searched. I checked. How have I never spoken of my undying devotion to Shirley? My friends, acquaintances and coworkers will tell you that she is all I am talking about right now, since, well, yesterday, which is forever to a person with my attention span.

Shirley Jackson was a master of the true horror story, the real psychological thriller, able to find the thread of strangeness, danger and despair that underlies even the most innocent-seeming situation. In the space of a few pages, even a few paragraphs, she could show a person’s journey from sanity to psychosis—and make the reader not only accept it utterly, but live it as well. Even now, though the situations she wrote about are sometimes a bit dated, her prose is still somehow both eerie and atmospheric and yet spare and understated at the same time.

Two of my all-time favorite novels and several of my favorite short stories were penned by Shirley Jackson.

• The Haunting of Hill House remains one of the most effective and spine-chilling ghost stories ever written, almost fifty years after its publication. Don’t let the fact that the first film adaptation was only passably frightening deter you; the book is phenomenal. (The abomination that was the second adaptation doesn’t even bear mentioning.)
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which came out in 1962, is almost impossible to describe, and yet is one of the best novels I have ever read. Heartrending, terrifying and beautiful.
• Her short stories, which have been collected in several volumes, including The Lottery and Other Stories and Just an Ordinary Day, rival Ray Bradbury at his best in their succinct, biting irony, their unfailing power and their uncompromising strangeness.

I feel completely inadequate when I talk about an artist like Shirley Jackson, because I want to recreate for my audience the experience of reading one of her short stories, or of trying to recover from one of her novels, but I can’t. It’s impossible. So I commend you to her tender mercies, and hope that when she has taken you, and pummeled you, and shown you your own weaknesses and sicknesses, and wrung every drop of sweat and adrenaline out of you, that I will still recognize you when she is done, and that we can still be friends. If you ever trust anyone again, that is, now that you know what we all are capable of.

Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House, 1959

(P.S. For those of you who really care, here’s a good essay about Jackson by Kyla Ward, originally published in Tabula Rasa #7 in 1995.)