Shirley Jackson: Learning from the Masters

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In an early scene of the movie Rose Red, its author, Stephen King, playing the role of a pizza deliveryman, announces his delivery of a “fully loaded” pie for “Jackson.” The line is King’s tribute to the author of The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson, who also wrote the famous horror story “The Lottery.” (Rose Red is a takeoff--some might say a rip-off--of Jackson’s Haunting.)

What can the aspiring (or professional) horror writer learn from Jackson’s take on the fiction of fear? Quite a bit.

Like most writers, she writes what she knows. She begins many of her stories by recalling a situation or an incident that frightened her. In a letter she wrote, but never mailed, to the poet Howard Nemerov, she confesses, “I . . . consolidate a situation where I was afraid and. . . work from there.” Like King, Bentley Little, and other masters of the genre, Jackson finds the horrific, the eerie, and the dreadful in common, ordinary events and circumstances. She had, one might say, a highly developed sense of horror, just as the better comedians have a highly developed sense of humor.

Her discerning eye saw the dreadful and the appalling in people, places, and things that others tend to take for granted, accepting or rejecting without a second thought or, perhaps, any thought at all. In such activities as a communal lottery, a couple going about their daily business, the chores associated with marriage and motherhood, and college experiences, she found inspiration for six novels (The Road Through the Wall [1948], Hangman [1951], The Bird’s Nest [1954], The Sundial [1958], The Haunting of Hill House [1959], and We Have Always Lived in the Castle [1962]), three short story collections (The Lottery and Other Stories [1949], Come Along With Me [1968], and Just an Ordinary Day [1996]), and several other works for children and non-fiction publications.

Just as such contemporary horror writers such as Little, Dean Koontz, and H. P. Lovecraft locate the horrific in apathy, Jackson, like Little and King, finds it under the rock, so to speak, of everydayness. It is the malaise of the routine, the ordinary, the usual that destroys the mind and slays the soul. (For King, it is more a threat to one’s community, or hometown--an extension, as we have observed in other posts, of one’s own home.)


After marrying Stanley Edgar Hyman, she resided in Vermont, “in a quiet rural community with fine scenery and comfortably far away from city life”--an environment well in keeping with the ordinariness that infuses her fiction.

Interestingly, the houses in her stories are often more interesting (and sinister) than the stories’ characters. The opening to The Haunting of Hill House is justifiably famous:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

As a Wikipedia article points out, the same is true of the house that appears in The Sundial:

A less obvious but nonetheless imposing character in the novel is the Halloran house itself. Built by a man who came into great wealth late in his life, the house is lavish to the point of garishness, and the endless details of the grounds and interiors are carefully described by Jackson until they overwhelm both characters and reader alike. One of these details is the titular sundial, which stands like an asymmetrical eyesore in the middle of the mathematically perfect grounds and bears the legend “WHAT IS THIS WORLD?” (a quote from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in “The Knight's Tale”). Jackson herself was fond of joking of an “architectural gene” that cropped up in her family once every few generations, and the house presented in The Sundial might foreshadow the infamous Hill House in The Haunting of Hill House. In both Hill House and Sundial, there are many striking similarities between the two houses: both Hill House and Halloran House were built by husbands as gifts for wives who died shortly before or shortly after seeing the house for the first time, and both houses become the source of conflict between various family members who disputed the house's ownership. The “mathematically perfect” grounds and the jarring sundial might remind readers again of Hill House, where all the floors and walls are said to be slightly off-centre. Halloran House, while never openly “haunted” in the sense that Hill House claimed to be, is the site of at least two ghostly visitations.

The tendency to invoke the ominous character of everyday objects is a convention in the horror genre, and women writers frequently attribute such a quality to houses and to domestic objects. One thinks, for example, of Charlotte Gilman Perkins’ “The Yellow Wallpaper” and of the house in which the apparent death of her husband prompts a revelation in the protagonist concerning her personal plight in “The Story of an Hour.”

It is possible, given Jackson’s statement that she starts her stories with “a situation where I was afraid and. . . work[s] from there” that her agoraphobia was a source of her interest in depicting sinister houses. Typically, an person who suffers from agoraphobia finds comfort in familiar surroundings, especially their homes, and are loathe to leave these sanctuaries of safety and security. What if one’s sanctuary should turn upon one, betraying one--perhaps even, in a manner of speaking, stalking one? The result could be The Haunting of Hill House, The Sundial, or We Have Always Lived in the Castle. At least, Sigmund Freud might entertain such notions. If we were to go so far as to take a leaf from those who believe in the efficacy of dream analysis (whose number numbers not only psychoanalysts of the Freudian stripe but others as well), and consider the house a symbol of the body, many of Jackson’s works might even be considered, like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” examples of body horror.

It seems possible, too, that Jackson found the multi-tasking, or more specifically, the multiple roles of modern women to be a potential source of stories of the uncanny and the bizarre. In “Shirley Jackson: Delight in What I Fear,” Paula Guran points out that there is something almost schizophrenic about the many roles that contemporary women perform: “We're all expected to be multiple personalities these days. Nurturing mom, supportive wife, hard driving on the job and carpool driving off. Or maybe we can create a great soufflé while whipping up a new novel. If we've opted for a family we have to somehow be several people at once.” She points out, furthermore (as Chillers and Thrillers also points out, taking a different approach, in an earlier post) that “Writers often feed their creativity through several coexisting personalities.” (The mother who can’t balance the demands of these conflicting roles has recently become a stereotype in contemporary horror fiction, recognizable in King’s Carrie, Robert McCammon’s Mine!, Robert Bloch’s Psycho, and, of course, she originally appeared in ancient myth as such characters as the furies, the gorgons, the lamia, and the sirens.

So, what have we learned from our consideration of Shirley Jackson as a master of contemporary horror fiction? Quite a bit:

• Relive the fear, using it as the basis for creating a horror story.
• Find the terror in everyday situations and incidents.
• Don’t overlook the opportunities for horror that exist in one’s own phobias, if one is fortunate enough to acquire any such “irrational” fears.
• For hints of the horrific, look to the conflicts generated by the familial, social, and other roles that one is compelled to play.
• Seek the horrific in the things, as well as the persons and places, associated with the familial, social, and other roles that one is compelled to play: any may inspire a story that makes readers’ hair stand on end and pimples their flesh with goose bumps.
• Understand the horror of betrayal by the people--or places or things--that one holds nearest and dearest to one’s heart (and remember that no one, no place, and nothing is really safe).
• Know that even Mom (and her apple pie), emptied of the good or seasoned with madness and taken to extremes, can be truly terrifying.
• Realize that horror, like evil itself, is not only natural, social, psychological, and theological in nature, but that it is, above all, personal and should be taken personally.

Ideas That Don’t Work

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

When major players in the horror (or any other) genre succeed, they do so on a Wimbledon, World Series, or Super Bowl level. However, when they fail, they also fail on a spectacular level. Most of the time, the Stephen Kings and the Dean Koontzes and the Robert McCammons and the Douglas Prestons and the Lincoln Childs succeed. Occasionally, they don’t. This post is going to look at, possibly with a wince and a cringe, a couple of the more monumental disappointments in horror fiction--at ideas that didn’t work.

If in no other way than sheer volume, Stephen King’s novel, It, is one of the true monuments of horror fiction. Vast in scope, it’s equally ambitious--some have contended that it’s maybe too ambitious. Published in 1986, the tome contains over 1,000 pages. It tells the story of a band of unlikely adolescent heroes, The Losers’ Club. In 1958, they rid their town, Derry, Maine, of an ancient evil that comes in the protean, ever-changing form of a shape shifter dubbed “It.” Often, It wears the face of a diabolical clown, Pennywise, but it also appears as a mummy, a werewolf, or whatever other monstrous shape most terrifies the boy or girl to whom it appears.

Flash forward. It’s now 1985, and the Losers are successful adults, living out their lives in various, far-flung cities. Only one of them, Mike Hanlon, Derry’s librarian, has remained behind. When it seems that It has returned to Derry, Hanlon alerts the others, who’d sworn to return to vanquish the monster again if it ever comes back. All of them do return, except Stan Uris, who commits suicide upon hearing the news that their old adversary has returned. The adults take on their childhood foe, vanquishing it again in the sewers beneath Derry--for the last time, they hope.

The story proper is suspenseful, action-packed, and chilling--just what readers want and expect from King. It might well have been his magnum opus but for three ideas that don’t work. One of these ideas is similar--in fact, identical--to a J. R. R. Tolkien idea that doesn’t work, and Tolkien’s idea doesn’t work for the same reason that King‘s doesn‘t work.

Tolkien’s massive trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, is even longer, and far more complicated, that It. Although Tolkien’s tale is a fantasy, rather than a horror novel and it has moments of humor, it is, like It, an epic tale, and its tone remains elevated and noble throughout (except at one climactic moment), as befits an epic adventure. If not exactly elegant, the tone of King’s story is at least fairly serious, most of the way through, and would be sufficient except that, at the moment of the story’s climax, what has been a grand epic suddenly becomes a farce as the protagonists who have risked life and limb, both as adolescents and as adults, finally come face to face with the ancient evil that has haunted them since their childhood and has stalked society itself for centuries, and it turns out to be the same sort of corny, comic book monster that Tolkien, after the long and arduous journey that his band of heroes has undertaken, at great cost to their own physical and mental well being, presents to Frodo and Sam Gamgee: a giant spider. At these moments of climax, both King and Tolkien sorely disappoint their readers. Have they come so far, witnessing so much suffering, death, sacrifice, horror, and terror--and have they spent so many, many hours--to face, at the stories’ most emphatic moments, nothing more than an overblown arachnid? It’s ludicrous. And it’s a letdown.

A spider writ large is an idea that doesn’t work.

It’s not only disappointing, but it also makes the reader feel as if he or she has been cheated--and, worse yet, cheated after having read hundreds and hundreds of pages!

It would have been better to have left the big bad thing unseen or to have simply suggested its appearance than to have presented the reader with a spider as the embodiment of inexpressible horror. All that buildup has led to nothing more than a spider? We feel as if we’re Little Miss Muffet, and we wish we’d never sat down on our tuffets to read such claptrap.

We can forgive Tolkien, although not easily, because the rest of his epic is a true epic, in execution as well as in spirit. Although King has thrilled and chilled us at many turns and has, in the main, told an engrossing story, he didn’t stop with his stupid spider. He topped himself in reaching an even lower low. The spider’s age-old enemy is--drum roll, please!--a turtle.

It’s not just any turtle, though. It’s special.

In fact, it’s the creator of the entire cosmos. Countless ages ago, it seems that the reptile had a bad case of indigestion, causing it to regurgitate, and it vomited the universe from its upset tummy. As if even that‘s not enough for King, it’s implied that the turtle might have vomited forth several other universes as well. The spider-monster was a terrible idea, as is the turtle, but making them ancient enemies and having the universe result from a case of terrapin heaves is just too Kurt Vonnegut, especially for a horror novel that, up to now, at least--which is to say, for hundreds and hundreds of pages--has taken itself seriously and has given the reader every impression that he or she should also take the story seriously.

The result is that It becomes an ouroboros, putting not its foot in its mouth but another part of its anatomy. Tolkien’s tale, although damaged somewhat by the tacky, tacked-on spider-monster, retains its overall epic stature, because he doesn’t offer another idea that doesn’t work, letting ill enough alone. King’s It, which had such promise and could have been a great horror story, a masterpiece of the genre, is, instead, a massive, spectacular failure that ends as a parody of itself. King got into such a fix, perhaps, because he doesn’t know when to stop. The novel, in some critics’ opinions, is too long by half. In going for length, the author sacrifices quality, one bad idea being followed by a second and a third.

The spider-monster is an idea that doesn’t work.

The turtle-creator is an idea that doesn’t work.

The creation of the universe ex vomitus is an idea that doesn’t work.

Ultimately, therefore, It is a wannabe epic novel that doesn’t work.

It’s hard to believe that King's first novel, Carrie (1976), is of better narrative qualitythan It, which was penned relatively late in his career.

Alternative Explanations, Part III: Telekinetic and Levitating Characters

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In “Alternative Explanations, Part II: Clairvoyants,” we considered ways by which skeptics seek to debunk alleged clairvoyance. In Part III, we will take a look at how the skeptical character in your horror story may seek to dismiss or provide a natural explanation for alleged telekinetic characters such as Stephen King’s Carrie White and levitating characters such as Regan MacNeil.

Telekinesis refers to the alleged power of some individuals to move or affect material objects with nothing more than the power of their minds. Uri Geller is one such individual. He claims to be able to bend spoons and to perform other feats involving material objects (keys and stopwatches are favorites) by exercising his mind alone.

Scientists have a simple explanation for apparent telekinetic feats in relation, at least, to such objects as pencils and other lightweight things: the supposedly telekinetic person surreptitiously blows on the object that he or she seeks to move.

According to The Skeptic’s Dictionary, Uri Geller met his match when he appeared on The Tonight Show. The host, Johnny Carson, was a former professional magician, and he switched the stock of spoons that Geller had brought to the show to bend with a supply of Carson’s own. Geller decided that he was not up to snuff that night and refused to try to bend the unfamiliar spoons. Carson and a fellow professional magician, the famous debunker James Randi, suspected that Geller had “softened” his spoons before bringing them onto the show, which prompted Carson to make the switch.

Randi got into a protracted and controversial public argument with Geller that included a series of lawsuits filed by each party against the other and a chapter in Randi’s book on hoaxes and frauds, Flim-Flam, or The Truth About Geller. In addition to the blowing-of-lightweight-objects explanation that some scientists have advanced to discredit apparent telekinesis, your horror story’s skeptical character may wish to employ some of Randi’s debunking arguments, among which is that Geller, in handling the spoons, surreptitiously bends them.

Another who has exposed Geller’s apparent trickery is Massimo Polidoro, a founder of the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CICAP), who discovered a videotape that shows Geller, who appeared on an Italian television program to demonstrate his telekinesis by bending a key and stopping a watch with nothing more than an exercise of his mental powers, apparently cheating at one of the tasks: “Geller can be seen taking out the stem of the watch to move its hands, maybe thinking that the move went unnoticed.”

Surreptitious blowing, bending, and using sleight-of-hand tricks seem to explain the inexplicable powers of Uri Geller, but what about those who claim to be able to rise into thin air and float or hover without benefit of any mechanical devices--in other words, to levitate themselves through the application of telekinesis? What might your horror story’s skeptical character say about this alleged paranormal ability? The Skeptic’s Dictionary attributes levitation to the use of “’invisible’ string, magnets, and other trickery.”

One of the most chilling levitation scenes occurs in The Exorcist, in which Regan MacNeil levitates out of her bed and hovers within a foot of the ceiling, shocking the priests who have been called to her house to exorcize the demon--or legion of demons--who are inhabiting her body. In her case, according to the film, at least, the devil made her do it, but how else can people levitate--or pretend to levitate themselves, others, or objects?

Saints are alleged to have levitated themselves, as have Indian fakirs. Likewise, witches claim to be able to make their bodies--or objects--float off the ground and soar through the air. (When witches levitate, it’s known as transvection.)

In one levitation trick, a magician used a steel beam to support his assistant, whom he was claiming to levitate. After she was horizontal above the stage floor, he passed a hula hoop around her body, from her head to her feet. The section of the hoop that he held between his hands had been removed so that the resulting gap could be passed “through” the beam, creating the illusion that there was no obstruction to impede the passage of the hoop. The result was to make it appear that the woman really was floating unsupported in midair, or levitating. The effect was quite amazing--until the magician revealed how he’d accomplished the trick. In a videotape on The Skeptic’s Dictionary website, famed magician Chris Angel demonstrates another method of levitating.

Your horror story’s skeptical character could challenge a levitating character by suggesting that the trick is accomplished in one of these ways or by the use of another technique. Magicians have worked out several variations by which to make themselves, other persons, and even inanimate objects “float” in, through, and around in thin air--or seem to do so.

Sources Cited and Further Reading:

The Skeptic’s Dictionary
Live Science
Federation of American Scientists
NOVA Online
MythBusters

In Part IV of “Alternative Explanations,” we’ll consider how your horror story’s skeptical character might debunk claims that such creatures as vampires, werewolves, and zombies exist.