New York Review of Books Review

NEAR the end of Shirley Jackson's most famous novel, "The Haunting of Hill House," the heroine, a lonely young woman named Eleanor, thinks to herself, "What I want in all this world is peace, a quiet spot to lie and think, a quiet spot up among the flowers where I can dream and tell myself sweet stories." And Eleanor does dream, but the stories, for her as for her creator, are rarely sweet. The very welcome Library of America edition of Jackson's work, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, contains, in addition to "Hill House," 46 of her short stories, another novel - her last, "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" - and an essay on the furious reactions to the magazine publication of her peerlessly disturbing 1948 tale "The Lottery." Although few of the narratives collected here are as terrifying as "Hill House" or as shocking as "The Lottery" (which is about an exceptionally nasty small-town ritual), there's precious little comfort in any of them. They're quiet, usually, told in calm, precise, scrupulously unsensational prose, but peace of the kind for which poor Eleanor yearns is always elusive. There's none apparent in the wide world - Jackson wrote at the height of the cold war, when anxiety was general, even fashionable. The first story in the book, "The Intoxicated," is about a 17-year-old girl who sobers up an inebriated partygoer with a coolly imagined vision of the end of civilization: "Maybe there'll be a law," she speculates, "not to live in houses, so then no one can hide from anyone else, you see." And Jackson knew too well that there's not much peace in houses, either: no place, anywhere, to hide. Shirley Jackson spent a good deal of her brief life - she died in her sleep in 1965, at 48 - playing the role of housewife and mother. She had a husband and four children, and in her final years ventured outside only infrequently. She lived indoors and in her head, wrangling her kids and her spouse and spinning her odd stories. Houses loomed large in her imagination, as places that promise but never quite deliver some respite from everyday terrors. In one of her last published stories, "The Little House," a young woman - practically all the main characters in Jackson's fiction are women - inherits a small, quaint house from her aunt, but before she's had a chance to settle in, a visit from a pair of old neighbor ladies, soft-spoken but fearsomely passive-aggressive, sends her into a panic. After they've left, her new digs feel suddenly, inexplicably menacing. "'Don't leave me here alone,' she said, turning to look behind her, 'please don't leave me here alone.' " Many of Jackson's stories seem, as "The Little House" does, barely more than casual conversational encounters, between neighbors or friends or lovers or simply people on the street, but they generally end in unease: some petty rudeness, some fleeting hint of malice, reveals itself, and the world begins to look weird and unaccountable, vaguely but unmistakably threatening. It happens again and again, story after story, day after ordinary day, and in the end someone is always more alone than she was before. A lot of writers, both in and out of the horror genre, know how to create a sense of dread. What makes Jackson's sensibility so distinctive is that her brand of dread tends to be self-aware and even, at times, self-amused. There's often a tinge of embarrassment to her characters' fear, simply because it's so tenuous, so apparently sourceless: they can't tell if what's troubling them is something or nothing. In Hill House, which Jackson characterizes as "not sane," all it takes to make Eleanor and her fellow ghost hunters feel profoundly uncomfortable is the house's "unbelievably faulty design which left it chillingly wrong in all its dimensions, so that the walls seemed always in one direction a fraction longer than the eye could endure, and in another direction a fraction less than the barest possible tolerable length." But the heroine, at least initially, tries to shake off the bad vibes, to chalk her queasiness up to an overactive imagination: "Really, she told herself, really, Eleanor." Most of Jackson's fiction affects the reader the way Hill House affects Eleanor - you're spooked, then you feel a little silly, and then, like it or not, you're spooked again. This peculiarly Jacksonian disquiet operates in almost every one of her stories, not just the tiny handful that could be called horror. A fair amount of her work is comic; in her lifetime, she was perhaps as well known for her humorous sketches about her unruly household as she was for having written "The Lottery." (Three of those funny domestic vignettes are in the Library of America collection.) And even these, written for such unlikely publications as Good Housekeeping, don't seem wholly out of character. There's an eerie detachment to them: for Jackson, everything, even her own apparently happy family life, turns strange in the telling. Oates's selection is canny. "The Haunting of Hill House" and "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" are the best of Jackson's six novels (though it's a shame that space couldn't have been found for "The Bird's Nest," a dryly unsettling 1954 novel about multiple-personality disorder), and the 21 uncollected and unpublished stories here are drawn largely from the posthumous 1968 volume "Come Along With Me," wisely put together by Jackson's husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. (The other 25 stories are the contents of the 1949 collection "The Lottery.") Jackson wrote wonderfully at every stage of her career, but it's the later work, from her difficult last years, that sticks most tenaciously in the imagination, stories about desperate homebound fantasies and overfamiliar fears. The real horror of "The Haunting of Hill House" is that sad Eleanor actually feels more alive in that "chillingly wrong" place than she ever has in her own home. (She lived with her demanding mother for most of her adult life.) The house's terrors seem custom-made for her troubled psyche: they make her feel special. And the heroine and narrator of "We Have Always Lived in the Castle," 18-year-old Mary Katherine Blackwood (known as Merricat), manages to turn her crumbling family home, where she lives with her sister and her dotty uncle, into a pure expression of her own childish and profoundly unstable personality, a playhouse of disturbed dreams. It's a place for her to hide, deep in herself, safe from the sinister encroaching of the outside world. In a way, Merricat's crazy house is where writers go when they write, that quiet spot where nothing is ever as peaceful as it seems. It's where Shirley Jackson went, anyway, and where she stayed, the scary place that felt like home to her. Few of the stories here are as shocking as 'The Lottery,' but there's precious little comfort in any of them. Terrence Rafferty is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.