Dark Tales, wooo-ooo

This collection of short fiction by Shirley Jackson is not all previously uncollected or unpublished, but if you have a copy of The Lottery and Other Stories, there are no repeats for this one. About a third of these stories are found in the Library of America collection though. The stories here are called Dark Tales, and minus the memoir pieces, all Shirley Jackson stories are dark stories. What sets off most of these stories is the intrusion of darkness into otherwise ordinary lives. Sometimes this means murder showing up, but more so than that, the erasure of the normal from a normal life. A man comes home from work after a 12 hour deluge of paranoid thoughts only to find his wife whispering into the phone when she goes to make him a drink. A woman who runs away to hide from the world finds that no one recognizes her when she returns. A woman keeps having intrusive violent thoughts about her husband. A woman meets her husband at the door, but it’s not him, but she goes with it anyway. One of the blessings of so much horror and thriller fiction is the exceptionality of the experiences. This creates a necessary distance for readers to enjoy the thrill of it without any of the real terror. Stephen King mostly functions in this space, but if you’ve read Cujo or one of the other of his books that does not employ supernatural elements, his disturbing creations become deeply depressing in addition to scary. Almost all of these stories occupy that familiar space, without getting into abjectness of horror writers, and that leaves them mostly in these unsettling places.