Celebrate Women's Month: Read Shirley Jackson

More reasons to celebrate.  Finally -- and wow, this is overdue--Library of America has created an edition of Shirley Jackson's great novels and short stories.  I say, finally, because Jackson has had to wait in line after, say, Dashiell Hammett.  Huh.

Don't get me wrong.  Nothing wrong with giving Hammett his due.  I like (sort of) Hammett (well actually, I don't, but he can be part of the canon.)

But seriously?  If the mission of LOA is to honor America's great writers, where was Shirley Jackson?  She's a writer who gets into your bones and your head.  She is just a great writer.

Hers is the voice of everyday, familiar fears, the woman who crawls inside families, sisters, crazy houses made crazy by the people in them.  Jackson is the voice of everyday hatred turned into evil.  The world that is always about to turn dark, and unpredictable, the world teetering on itself.  There are just so many fine short stories and two truly unforgettable novels -- "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" and "The Haunting of Hill House."

So celebrate and read.  It's a good time to be scared.  
    

Fright Reads for Halloween!

Halloween guest post from occasional blog contributor and avid reader Judith Orlowski.

When it gets to be mid October, my thoughts turn to the scary.  

As soon as I hang up the mutant skeleton on the front door - mutant because over the years, some of his bones have mysteriously disappeared making him (Bob I call him) a freak with one foot on a tibia-only leg and no foot on the full length leg - I start re-reading my fave creepy books.  Nothing satisfies like reading at night by a small light, sleepy and yet afraid to turn off the lamp.  

Begin with the classics. Monsters that scare the crap out of me, means starting with Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  The prose is beautifully creepy and probes what makes us humans in search of immortality - as a vampire, or one of the first zombies created by Dr Frankenstein.  You can't die if you aren't really alive, right?

Then there are the modern classics.  

Maybe you like demons and possession?  Read William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby or Tryon (The Other, Harvest Home)  Brilliantly plotted, they've put me off certain foods thanks to the equally scary movies - Linda Blair ruined me for pea soup, Mia Farrow for rare meat, and don't get me started on red wine, Mr Tryon.  Gross!

The prolific:

-- Shirley Jackson excels at simple spooky stories with a twist.  The Lottery is quaint but horrifying. The Haunting of Hill House invented the lock-em-in/kill-em-off-one-by-one grisly genre.  

-- Stephen King -  If you weren't creeped out by clowns before, read IT and research serial killer John Wayne Gacy.  Rainbow wigs on cute trick-or-treaters will set you to cowering.

Finally, there's the horror of the loss of humanity or sanity.  

--Cormac McCarthy's The Road left a lasting impression that has been revisited in AMC's Walking Dead.  

--Human lunch meat is a trope of Thomas Harris' malevolent genius Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs.

--Charles Dickens showed us the horror of madness with Miss Havisham in Great Expectations.  Nobody wants to say yes to that dress!  

Get yourself some light bulbs, a box of saltines for the nausea, and settle down to seriously frightening reads that will take you from Halloween through year end.  Enjoy!

Recommendations: Women's Scary Fiction for Halloween

I love scary stories of the literary variety .  As some of you know, I have flirted with ghosts in Nine Romantic Stories, in "A String Theory Valentine"-- and even wrote a "Happy Halloween" Tale that is now available in an Amazon anthology, 13 Bites.  What better way celebrate Halloween than reading some good old-fashioned spooky tales?  But for my money, some of the chillier chills come from women writers -- more inner demons and fewer of the flying variety, more psychology and less gore.

So here is my list for stories that sent some literary chills down my spine that make for perfect Halloween reading:

 Revenge by Yoko Ogawa.

These exquisitely dark tales by this contemporary Japanese writer are in the great tradition of weird and wonderful-- and I first learned of them through our own interview with Jessica Treat ( who recommended them.)  This author has a peculiar sense of the macabre that must come from the food they eat in Japan.  A woman buys a cake for a dead child, and another visits a museum of torture.  Spooky and fantastic.





Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark.

 I am a Dame Muriel addict, and gleefully devour everything she's written. And those familiar with novels like The Bachelors might be prepared for some dark, wild story-telling-- Spark always surprises.  But Dame Muriel also had a way with ghosts. It's fun to see her wicked prose tangle with the supernatural -- sometimes to comic effect, and sometimes to scary.  One of the best here is a first person narrative -- a lost ghost waiting to find her own death.






Classics of the Macabre by Daphne du Maurier.  

Mention Daphne du Maurier, and most people think of the Hitchcock films, The Birds and Rebecca.  Some may recall the Nicholas Roeg film, shot in Venice, Don't Look Now.  But the original stories, especially those in this volume, are far better than the films.  "The Apple Tree" is as frightening a tale of marriage gone wrong as any I have read -- and the original, "Don't Look Now" is lyrical, mysterious and terrifying.  I found this book in a gorgeous edition with illustrations by Micheal Foreman.


The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

This is another case of who knew?  Yes, it's the very same Edith Wharton who wrote The House of Innocence and Ethan Frome  (which as I think about it, is a very scary tale.) It turns out that Wharton had a flair for the classic ghost tale. I'm guessing that her affinity for Henry James (whose Turn of the Screw is one fantastic ghost story) led her to the genre-- but, read and you will see, she's no slouch.  Wharton loves the idea of old haunted houses, and she is great at those stories.  But to my tastes, her mastery is best shown in "Miss Mary Pask," in which the narrator falsely believes he is speaking to a dead woman and where "night and fog were now one." A perfect Halloween tale.





We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.

To me, this might be Number One on the all time spookiest books ever written.  Jackson doesn't need the supernatural to scare the living daylights out of you.  Her story of women who lock themselves into their own house is more frightening, more upsetting, than stories of demons or ghouls. Isolation is scary.  If any book can haunt you, it's this one -- and for years after you put it down.