Shirley Jackson: Six Best Novels

The American author, Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), well-known as the author of the oft-taught short story "The Lottery," has been having a revival lately, and a new biography, A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin, is coming out September 27. Apparently, Franklin had access to more documentation than Jackson's previous biographer, Judy Oppenheimer, who published Private Demons in 1988. Franklin's foreword to The Road Through the Wall was somewhat off-putting, so I'm a little leery of the new biography, but anticipating it nonetheless; I thought Private Demons was excellent.

Shirley Jackson completed six novels in her lifetime: The Road Through the Wall (1948), Hangsaman (1951), The Bird's Nest (1954), The Sundial (1958), The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). None of these novels are related, but in each themes and incidents overlap. The isolated young woman, the traumatic event, the difficult family, the psychological maze, the damaged soul, the allusive building, facets of personalities, a vague aura of magic. Road, her first novel, is Jackson's growing-up book, about the perils of adolescence in darkest suburbia. In Hangsaman a young protagonist ventures into the psychological dangers of college. The Bird's Nest continues and deepens the psychological investigation of family and isolation in a young woman, newly employed. Somewhat apart from the other novels is The Sundial, about the approaching end of the world, but still with family, psychology, and danger to the fore. The Haunting of Hill House (with a protagonist now somewhat older than in Bird's Nest) is psychic terror and damage made manifest, physically alive, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a fully interior and exterior investigation of all of the above, including the menace of small towns begun in "The Lottery" and Road. So which are Shirley Jackson's best novels? Her novels fall into two camps, the three best and the three others. Her best are Hangsaman, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Castle is, for me, clearly the best; I find it irresistible. The other two fight it out for second place, both being expeditions into the darkness of psychic realms, Hangsaman very interior, Haunting with psychology made physical (as Jackson also ventured with The Bird's Nest). Of the three others The Sundial is my least favorite, though still enjoyable and unique. I'm not sure I can pick between Road and Bird's Nest, but if I had to I'd lean toward putting the former just a touch ahead of the latter. All are worth reading, and to a Shirley Jackson fan, the sorrow is that she wrote so little, so that all six novels are mandatory reading, all wonderfully and sensitively written.

Stephen King said that The Haunting of Hill House was one of the greatest horror novels of all time (and dedicated Firestarter to her), but I disagree. Shirley Jackson's books are not scary or horror tales (maybe they seemed that way in the '50s?), they are journeys inside troubled minds. The only horror is that which can reside in any of us. As mentioned above, once you start reading Jackson's work you will be haunted by echoes and deja vu from her other books. I agree with those who say that Jackson wrote from her unconscious. Her writing is careful and excellently executed, but I believe her plots came from somewhere deep inside her own damaged soul, which is displayed in myriad facets throughout her six novels. In all Shirley Jackson's books are the multiple personalities within her, and us. All six are just great reading.

Now, on to those short stories ... .