Guest Author - Sharon Cullars

October is the month for tales that prick the nerves, chill the bone, and cause your heart to dance a little faster. Horror fiction abounds this month, so we will look at an underpraised author who wrote tales of fear and madness even as she battled her own psychological demons. Most readers know Shirley Jackson from her short story, “The Lottery” (featured below), and her novel, The Haunting of Hill House, both of which have been dramatized in film. As popular as “The Lottery” is now, it was not well-received when it was first published in The New Yorker in 1948. Many readers became defensive at Jackson’s portrayal of ostensibly good people who seemed very much like themselves but who were capable of horrific brutality. To them, Jackson had despoiled their idea of Norman Rockwell’s Americana, had yanked off the illusory sheep’s covering and shown the primitive carnivore hiding beneath.

Although Jackson’s works are assumed to be primarily about the supernatural, most of her stories dwelt on the conundrum of the human psyche, the contradiction of nice people doing horrible things, the evolving of a mind into madness, the mundaneness of evil. A wife (she married Stanley Edgar Hyman, a fellow classmate at Syracuse University and later a literary critic), mother of four children, and a chronic sufferer of depression and anxiety, Jackson found solace in writing, and before her death at the age of 46, she had written and published forty-four short stories; six articles; two book-length family chronicles; one children's nonfiction book; and four novels.

On the surface, Jackson’s life was ordinary (although she was known to dabble in voodoo and witchcraft). Born in suburban comfort in California, she attended and graduated Syracuse, married and eventually settled into the suburban comfort of first Vermont, then Connecticut. She also tended to her husband and raised her children. But when she sat down to write, brilliance flowed from her pen and initially resistant critics would in the end acknowledge that Jackson was uniquely talented. Jackson did not limit her prose to horror, and a few years after “Lottery”, she published a humorous account of her domestic life in Life Among the Savages. Still, she is better known for her short stories and she penned four collections of them. Of her novels, Hill House remains a timeless supernatural and psychological thriller that preceded Hitchcock’s best and established Jackson’s reputation as a master of gothic horror.

Even as she suffered from her fears, she learned how to use these fears in her writing. She once said: "...I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from there...I delight in what I fear." -- from an unsent letter to poet Howard Nemerov by Shirley Jackson (OMNI Online, 1997).

Ironically, just as Jackson learned to combat her demons and fears through psychotherapy and medication, her body gave out from a combination of smoking, obesity and other health complications. Her last story, “The Possibility of Evil” was published four months after her death in 1965 and won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Still, “The Lottery” remains Jackson’s signature with all its horror and controversy.

Read The Lottery