The first time I read “The Lottery,” I didn't read it. I heard it on The New Yorker Fiction podcast, read brilliantly by A.M. Holmes. I was already deeply enamored with Southern Gothic lit — Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor — so I was pretty well primed for it. But “The Lottery,” specifically, was so weird, so dark, and yet so benign. I loved it immediately. And as I listened to it, walking in the rain in downtown Seattle in the darkest part of an early morning, I thought “this lady definitely had some kind of something going on.”
No neurotypical person could create that kind of spooky universe. And indeed, no neurotypical person did.
In her short lifetime (she died at just 48), Jackson was a fairly prolific, though relatively unknown writer. That’s changed significantly; she’s now one of the most well-known modern horror (though there’s debate about how much of her work is really “horror'“) authors thanks to streaming services. Scientologist Elisabeth Moss plays her in the biographical drama Shirley, and two of her books — We Have Always Lived In The Castle and The Haunting of Hill House — have been turned into Netflix series.
It’s not surprising; stories like “The Lottery” may have incensed readers of The New Yorker upon publication in 1948, but today’s true-crime-obsessed, horror-loving viewers were ripe for her style of storytelling. In These Trying Times, we seem to be sprinting toward media that offers a comparison — which means it must be more bleak, more gory, more bone-chilling.
Reading back over her work, it sounds like something that may just as easily have been published today. This is a short excerpt from We Have Always Lived In The Castle, a novel about families, isolation, agoraphobia, and secrets. Oh, and murder.
There was no one there, and no sound. We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame. I saw that ash had drifted among the vegetable plants; the lettuce would have to be washed before I could eat it, and the tomatoes. No fire had come this way, but everything, the grass and the apple trees and the marble bench in Constance's garden, had an air of smokiness and everything was dirty. As we came closer to the house we saw more clearly that the fire had not reached the ground floor, but had had to be content with the bedrooms and the attic. Constance hesitated at the kitchen door, but she had opened it a thousand times before and it ought surely to recognize the touch of her hand, so she took the latch and lifted it. The house seemed to shiver when she opened the door, although one more draft could hardly chill it now. Constance had to push at the door to make it open, but no burned timber crashed down, and there was not, as I half thought there might be, a sudden rushing falling together, as a house, seemingly solid but really made only of ash, might dissolve at a touch.
Her focus on supernatural, surreal, and downright sinister plots might have just been chalked up to being an odd bird at a time when conformity, especially for women, was key. But, as is so often the case. the spooky shit that came out of Jackson was most likely a product of the spooky shit that echoed in her head.
Biographer Ruth Franklin even named her book Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life because like, it’s impossible to ignore.
Franklin draws comparisons between Jackson and other famous writers (like Poe), who use their work “to plumb the depths of the human condition.” Her characters and the perils they navigate reflect her own experiences with depression and anxiety. And while this is the reason, I suspect, that her material is such a perfect fit for modern adaptation, it was also possibly what kept Jackson from getting the acclaim she deserved. As Franklin writes, “critics have tended to underestimate Jackson’s work; both because of its central interest in women’s lives and because some of it is written in genres regarded as either, ‘faintly disreputable’ (in the words of one scholar) or simply uncategorizable.”
The throughline through much of Jackson’s work, though, is a feeling of unease in the world, which is something she experienced in spades. Jackson, like Constance in We Have Always Lived In The Castle, suffered from agoraphobia and frequently avoided going out. This was made easier when she began experiencing physical health problems. To treat her “nerves,” she was prescribed powerful barbiturates, which only added to her deteriorating health.
All of this would make life difficult, but there was more to Shirley Jackson’s struggles. A feature for Penguin points out that she had numerous compounding issues which proved to be fatal:
In an attempt to lose weight, Jackson became dependent on a cocktail of pills while sliding into alcoholism. After a breakdown in 1963, her agoraphobia worsened to the extent she barely left her bedroom. Her death, in her sleep, two years later was due to a heart attack.
Again, we see her own struggles in her work. The prose is simple but elegant, a product of its time and her Bennington education. But underneath the serenity of a June afternoon in some small town somewhere in the South, there is a dark current.
The main characters often feel chased or harangued or harmed by outside forces — usually their neighbors. They are hunted, misunderstood, and at the mercy of people and events that they can’t control. Whether it’s ritual murder or previous catastrophes or the legal system or the ghosts of trauma and generational harm, her hundreds of short stories and novels paint a portrait of a woman who was constantly seeking, grasping for something to hold on to for stability.
Consider The Haunting of Hill House, a true ghost story where the phantoms are both psychic and paranormal. The characters are haunted by actual ghosts in the house (possessed, in fact) and by their own secrets. As the paranormal research group prowls the dark halls, they’re also exploring themes of what it means to be home and the impacts of isolation.
I mean, look at this passage:
"Killed herself?" Eleanor, shocked into speech, half rose. "She had to kill herself?"
"You mean, was there another way of escaping her tormentor? She certainly did not seem to think so. It was accepted locally that she had chosen suicide because her guilty conscience drove her to it. I am more inclined to believe that she was one of those tenacious, unclever young women who can hold on desperately to what they believe is their own but cannot withstand, mentally, a constant nagging persecution; she had certainly no weapons to fight back against the younger sister's campaign of hatred, her own friends in the village had been turned against her, and she seems to have been maddened by the conviction that locks and bolts could not keep out the enemy who stole into her house at night—"
"She should have gone away," Eleanor said. "Left the house and run as far as she could go."
"In effect, she did. I really think the poor girl was hated to death; she hanged herself, by the way.
I get the sense that the drugs were her life raft. And writing was her life raft. And the safety of her bedroom was her life raft. And that all of those things together were not enough to float her into the spotlight where she properly belonged. She wrote about subtly horrible things because of her subtly horrible experience living life.
Because of course, the scariest things aren’t the ones that go bump in the night. The most frightening parts of being a person are navigating the distance between the inside of your head and the rest of the world.
And seriously, if you’ve never read or listened to “The Lottery,” it’s perfect for October. It’s scary as hell, if only because it all looks so normal.