This is Spooky Season!

So we have finally arrived at October, the month that never seems to last long enough! For myself and my lovely spouse, it’s almost like the start of our holiday season. My birthday has just passed, and hers is coming up, there’s Thanksgiving followed by Halloween, then our anniversary, and suddenly it’s time to start decorating for Christmas. It can go by quickly, and, when it does, I am very relieved that I started journaling a few years ago. It’s a way to slow down and at least do some reflection when life comes at you fast.

Reading also comes at me fast at this time of the year, which means my commonplace book becomes very important. I’m trying to read more mindfully and remember more of what I’m reading. Writing things down has really helped with that. It doesn’t help with the book storage problems that I’m beginning to run into, but one can’t ask for everything.

The Legend of Shirley Jackson

If you’ve never heard of Shirley Jackson, then you have missed out on a lot of great films and great books. Her work has experienced a bit of a revival in the last five years. Her novel The Haunting of Hill House became the 1963 film The Haunting directed by Robert Wise (which was later remade very badly in 1999). One of Jackson’s other novels, We Have Always Lived in the Castle has also been made into several films and recently (as in 2016) into a series on Netflix. ‘The Lottery’, her most well-known short story written in 1949, has been adapted for film, for stage, for television, and for radio. She wrote about her family quite extensively as well, and a few years ago a book of her letters were published. Jackson wrote prolifically and across different genres.

It’s a few of her most memorable and macabre her short stories that Penguin Classics has compiled into a slim volume titled Dark Tales. If you are in the mood for scary delights that are clear and concisely written and have a disturbing atmosphere without running up an unnecessary word count or getting bogged down by description, this is the book for you!

Stories That Are Meant to Disturb

The thing I love most about Jackson’s short stories is the way that she twists seemingly ordinary events into strange and unsettling directions. You won’t find ghouls and goblins here, but you will find human monsters and ominous atmospheres that leave the reader wondering how things went so wrong and why. This kind of scariness is not for everyone. There are a lot of stories that are disturbing just because they remain open-ended and malevolent. If that’s the kind of spooky that keeps you up at night, this might not be the book for you.

Some favourites from this collection:

‘The Honeymoon of Mrs Smith’

A woman has married a man that she barely knows and he’s not what he seems. Or, rather, he is exactly what he seems, and this knowledge is wrenched to the limit and taken to the edge.

‘What a Thought’

A woman has a random thought about killing her husband, and as it keeps recurring, it seems less and less random.

‘The Summer People’

A couple decide to stay in their cottage after Labour Day, when the rest of the summer people go home. It’s a choice that they soon come to deeply regret.

In Matters of Style

I’m sure by now, you have this memorized, but I’ll go ahead and repeat it. The caveat of any anthology is that some stories will be better than others. That is just as true for this collection, despite Jackson’s skill. There are some stories that are just not as developed and that do not pack the same punch as the rest of the collection.

Because this collection was not compiled by Jackson herself, and features stories of rather disparate dates of publication I find it a bit stylistically jarring. Jackson is a writer whose work has a trajectory and so this collection is jumping around in terms of style and skill. Some stories also don’t seem to quite fit the theme (for example, ‘Louisa, Please Come Home’ is a narrative that is distinctly literary and suggesting it is just ‘spooky’ does it a disservice) and that’s a bit surprising — considering just how many short stories there were to choose from.

Spooky Things to Come

I’ve tried to add a few weird selections to my spooky books this year — meaning a little bit of splatterpunk, and some rarer reprints. Plus, there’s all the new literature to post and be excited about. And the films! I’m so excited for Criterion’s Japanese Horror collection, and we’re still working our way through the collection of giallo that premiered earlier this month. So many books and so many films! I really wish that somehow October was twice as long.