Every Shirley Jackson Book, Ranked
All Hail Queen Shirley Jackson
Master Shelf: Shirley Jackson
Reading and Ranking an Author’s Entire Bibliography
Happy Hallowe’en (Shirley Jackson’s preferred spelling) and welcome to a special spooky edition of Dear Head of Mine. For this most magical of days I am starting a reoccurring series that won’t reoccur that often because of its very nature. The premise of this idea is that there are a small handful of authors that I feel completist about—the need as a reader to finish every book and word they’ve ever written. A couple of years ago, my now wife looked up as we were walking one crisp fall day (it may not have been fall or cold in reality, but in essence it was) and said that Shirley Jackson was her favorite writer. We both loved Shirley Jackson at that point, but I was a little shocked to realize I had to plead “no contest” in that moment and, coming up with no alternative, despite never having thought about it before, admit that Shirley Jackson was also my favorite writer. With that agreed, I realized I had to read everything Shirley Jackson ever wrote.
Shirley Jackson (hereafter referred to by her full name—she’s Shirley Jackson, not Shirley or Jackson, and we’ll keep honorific “queen” silent, but please fill that in mentally as you go) is not an overly-intellectual writer and yet is by no means an easy writer. She does not hand-hold, either in resolving the questions she asks or the situations she sets up. She is not easy to read sometimes even on a basic visual level, as she’ll move from one scene or phantasma to the next without much transition and never a tidy explanation for exactly what’s going on. If you read a Shirley Jackson story and then read the Wikipedia summary of it, you may feel, as I often do, as if the two do not match up with each other at all. The reading experience is far different than the liner notes.
Because of her subject matter and singular sense of the uncanny, Shirley Jackson is known as a horror and gothic writer, but I find that descriptor hardly accurate. There might be a patina of the macabre around Shirley Jackson’s world—poisons, magic, the supernatural—but as with any truly great writer, to call her genre “horror” or her stories “terrifying” feels reductionist. (I’m making this list on October 31st, so it’s somewhat unavoidable). At a certain point if writing is so good, the observations so universal, you just have to call it literature. Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” might feel like a horrific fable, but it wouldn’t be the most famous American short story if it didn’t strike a nerve of humanity that cuts deeper than its chilling premise and surprising twist.
There are infinite reasons why I love Shirley Jackson, many of which you will read here as I go through every one of her published works and rank them on the Shirley Jackson mega curve that starts at good on one end of the spectrum and quickly becomes overly weighted with masterpieces on the other. But to condense why Shirley Jackson is special to one sentence, why I had almost no words when my wife said out of the blue that Shirley Jackson was the best: she is in a league by herself, a one-of-one, completely and utterly absorbed by her own time and her own place and her own point of view; her stories are timeless and her style is as un-replicable as a human mind.
With that. Let us begin.
9. The Road Through the Wall (1948)
Shirley Jackson’s first novel, The Road Through the Wall, is a kaleidoscopic story of one summer on an idyllic suburban street that ends in tragedy. Every neighbor knows each other and their business: the girls write flirtatious letters to the boys, the boys play baseball, the mothers sew in groups, the dads drink, and the rumor, gossip, and outright slander fly around in equal measure. Overall The Road Through the Wall has a more familiar construction (suburbia), which contains a lot of pieces of Shirley Jackson’s signature style: excellent uncanny dialogue (especially from children), the haunted nature of domestic trappings of the 40s and 50s, and a particular unnerving way in which the people in her novels seem to be interacting past each other rather than with each other. But being that it is quite fragmentary in nature, The Road Through the Wall lacks the intense focus of her later novels, and its short sketches crammed into the novel form don’t have as much impact as her later short stories do. This novel shows many of the places she’s going, but heartening to all writers out there is that even masters grow, evolve, and get better.
8. Raising Demons (1957) 7. Life Among the Savages (1953)
Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons are Shirley Jackson’s two memoirs about raising her children in small-town, upstate Vermont. By and large there is no exceptional fiction writer that can’t also write nonfiction. In some cases, the nonfiction is even better. Not so for Shirley Jackson—who is, as previously stated, my wife’s and my favorite fiction writer ever—make no mistake that even at #8 and #7 on this list these books are absolutely wonderful.
While Shirley Jackson’s nonfiction is still utterly and completely her, it is vastly different from her fiction in its seriousness. While her novels and stories are sometimes humorous, they could rarely be considered lighthearted or laugh-out-loud affairs. In contrast, Shirley Jackson’s memoirs are light on their feet, incredibly funny, and charming, much like the city-writer-moves-to-rural-town musings of E.B. White’s essays. It’s a joy to read Shirley Jackson’s memoirs after you read her fiction because they allow you to step directly into the settings that are the overriding inspiration to her novels and stories. To see this translation from life to fiction, it’s worth reading side by side the short story “Charles” and the incident with her son that inspired it in Life Among the Savages. Reading her memoirs, you begin to fully appreciate what is a central strength and theme of her work: the dichotomy that exists in each of us, and how the line between ordinary and evil is no further away than a split second, a small change in perspective, a momentary shift. How life can be both full of small joys and torturous.
*Final note: Life Among the Savages ranks slightly higher of the two because it’s more successful in this chosen form. Whereas Raising Demons is slightly denser, Savages is quicker and sharper, but its a close call.
6. The Bird’s Nest (1954)
I recommend going into this novel without knowing anything and, as I did, without even reading the description. The Bird’s Nest has the most elements of any Shirley Jackson work that you might recognize in other books. There are plenty of signature only-Shirley-Jackson-could-have-written-this passages, but elements of the plot lead her into mystery/thriller territory that she never wades into otherwise. The story also begets a more familiar Henry James ghost story, nineteenth-century prose style in places. Relative lack of uniqueness should take nothing away from how compelling this book is. The Bird’s Nest is up there in terms of Shirley Jackson’s most surprising, gripping, cleverly structured novels. Even seventy years after the fact, it keeps you guessing and shows her unmatched felicity with voice, narrative device, and phrasing. Since I’ve been cagey about the plot, I’ll just leave you with this:
“I can only say again helplessly, that there is a world of difference between a wraith-like shadow and a real girl.” (136).
5. The Sundial (1958)
I’ve read many, many end of the world novels, and no one does it quite like Shirley Jackson. The Sundial’s basic premise is that relatives and various passers-through gather at the Halloran mansion, the only place that is protected from the End Times. The Hallorans being an old-money family whose house and grounds are falling apart as fast as they seem to be. Many have drawn the comparison and evolution from the Halloran house to Shirley Jackson’s more famous Hill House, and in both you will see elements from her own Vermont houses if you read her memoirs, which contain grandness and largess but with a healthy amount of disrepair and chaos.
As the apocalypse approaches many smaller dramas unfold in The Sundial. So, while the earth becomes engulfed in darkness, the most pressing concerns of most of the characters seems to be inheritance, petty slights, and getting to the bottom of other people’s business. The Sundial is extremely strange, haunted, and funny in its own absurd way. The phrase “shuffling chairs on the Titanic” comes to mind. Or, maybe it’s better described as a grand lawn party with a forest fire in the distance, raging winds whipping all around.
4. The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
Many people consider this to be Shirley Jackson’s masterwork, and it is probably her best known work. The fact that one can even reasonably rank this outside of her top three is a testament to how high of a level Shirley Jackson consistently operated. It’s widely considered the best haunted house story of all time and has one of Shirley Jackson’s trio of iconic young characters in Eleanor “Nell” Vance. “Place as character” is well worn as praise, but Hill House is the peak of this cliché with one of the best opening scene-setting paragraphs there is. This novel lays to rest any doubt that Shirley Jackson mastered the element of atmosphere as a writer.
If I’m going to add the most cursory of criticism as to why The Haunting of Hill House not among her three perfect works, it would be that some of the said haunting comes off as a bit silly (even if it is intended to be this way) whereas the psychological conditions of the characters’ descents into madness does much more than the supernatural to unnerve you. It’s still a stone cold masterpiece and in addition to being her most well-known novel, it has also been the most inspirational for other writers and artists. Most directly this has meant the Netflix series, which is a great adaption in my estimation: totally unlike the book and yet it takes seeds of the novel and its author (working things like Shirley Jackson’s incredible “cup of stars” passage as homage for instance) as license to make a something totally original and compelling in its own right. Even more recently it spawned the very first novel to be authorized by the Shirley Jackson estate that came out just this month A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand. But you can be assured that many, many more writers took indirect inspiration from this novel of immense style and profundity.
*Bonus: Posthumously Published Works (Let me Tell You, Come Along with Me, Just an Ordinary Day)
I have mixed feelings about posthumously published works. There’s some amount of commercial grab and potentially not honoring what they’re author might have wanted that can come into play and feel rather icky. But all in all, I’m very happy that Shirley Jackson’s posthumous works exist and are widely available for us to read, and they seem to have been issued by her family in a careful and thoughtful way. However, since we can consider these works forever unfinished in some sense — even though some of the short stories can stand with her published works — we won’t be ranking them. But for any Shirley Jackson completist (and I am), these are well worth reading. If you never tire from her voice (and I don’t), these contain interesting fragments of her other works with some genuinely masterful pieces here and there.
3. Hangsaman (1951)
A large part of me wanted to zag from what I believe should be the easy consensus and the true answer in order to put Hangsaman number one on this list. Hangsaman (it’s easy to forget that extra “a” when you say the title) has the most epic first chapter of any book I’ve ever read—at 60 pages in length it’s nearly a self-contained novella, one that goes in so many splintering directions and wallops you at the end. Then there’s a whole novel after that, which completely switches settings and tones. To me, Natalie Waite is an unforgettable protagonist and the perfect version of Shirley Jackson’s obsession with a certain type of young woman that she returns to again and again in her novels. Like many Shirley Jackson stories there are no neat resolutions to be found, but many unsettling scenes, odd moments, and masterful phrases that you will leave their imprint on you forever. I could give you the plot beats or the “setup” of Hangsaman but it wouldn’t do it even a small percentage of justice. Just read it.
2. The Lottery and Other Stories (1949)
There’s a reason “The Lottery” is one of the most anthologized American short stories of all time. The New Yorker received the most mail from readers it ever has when the story was first published in 1948. Like Gatsby or Mockingbird, it’s an institution in education. A story whose universality translates as well to fifteen-year-olds as well as fifty-five-year-olds. I distinctly remember hating almost everything I was assigned in English class, but thinking that this story was “pretty good” (in the way that it’s hard to admit that art, but especially subtle art, can be anything but “okay” when you’re young). What endures from that faint impression to this day is something that remains true even after reading every one of Shirley Jackson’s works, and that is that it never feels as if she is trying to be overly cute, clever, or important when she writes. There is no ego in Shirley Jackson stories or novels. Perhaps she worked hard at this, but to a certain extent it can’t be faked. Shirley Jackson is never trying to tell you what she thinks, she’s offering you peek into the fabric of humanity.
Like her novels, in her stories Shirley Jackson doesn’t seem to care about length either: when the story is done, it’s done. And both of these egoless qualities are essential to great short fiction: leaving events up for interpretation and not caring about length. This makes Shirley Jackson one of the best at leaving lingering impressions on a reader (even if you can’t remember the names of the story): The man who says the most violent things to children with unclear malice as easy as you would say “pass the toast”; one of the most uncomfortable before-dinner drinks ever rendered; the woman who sees a open house sign and naturally pretends to be a realtor when people stop by to look at the apartment. Shirley Jackson is the irrefutable proof that an author doesn’t have to write a book or story that sounds impressive on the surface (family epic! war! 900 pages!) in order to be impressive and leave a mark.
1. We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)
The final work Shirley Jackson completed before she died, We Have Always Lived in the Castle takes everything about the Shirley Jackson experience and distills it into one—and I don’t use this word lightly—perfect novel. “Why can’t more novels be written in 170-odd pages?” Is a question I find myself often asking when I think about, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. There’s nothing you would want to change about this book and despite its borderline-novella length it is am absolutely complete work, just because…it well is. “Complete” is the word, because that is the feeling that overtook me when I finished it the first time. Mary Katherine, “Merricat”, is easily my favorite book character. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is pure—it is transcendent in a way that makes you feel as if storytelling is the most simple and natural part of human nature. Instead of describing what We Have Always Lived in the Castle is about I’ll just leave Shirley Jackson herself to give you the entire architecture of the novel, containing all of the seeds from which the story will grow from in one opening paragraph:
“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”
And with that. Happy Hallowe’en.