I think this book has an unfortunate subtitle which kind of mars how good the book is and how remarkable Shirley Jackson was as a woman and a writer. The title comes from a review that more or less referred to her in this way. That question, how could the writer responsible for the funny family-memoirs Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages also write The Haunting of Hill House, “The Lottery”, and others?
The answer of course is complex and simple at the same time. The simple answer is because she did. The more complex answer relies on seeing the playfulness and black humor in the dark pieces (I find “The Lottery” hilarious at times) and seeing the darker edges in the lighter pieces. If you take the story “Charles” in which Shirley Jackson’s son Laurie goes off to kindergarten and immediate begins reporting a classmate who terrorizes the class and teacher so much that everyone is in thrall each day, only to find out that child does exist, the implications are that Laurie does all this. But the darker edge to this is that the mother narrator and the father don’t seem to allow for this. The mother perhaps because she has blinders up, and the father because he’s not really looking. In both memoirs, the wry sense of humor is obvious in the very titles. In the darker pieces, the lightness is always there at least in the irony, if not in the fun (and sometimes in the fun too).
I am not sure how to frame this book for a reader. I read all of Shirley Jackson’s novel last year, and reread two story collections. I also read her collected letters, and recently read Ralph Ellison’s collected letters, and his friendship with Shirley Jackson and her husband (and his respected for their writing and theirs for his) helped frame my reading of this.