Right now I'm reading Shirley Jackson's The Sundial. Re-reading it, actually, but it's just as fresh the second time around. It's a story about the Hallorans, a wealthy and screwed up family, holed up in their house with cousins and servants after the untimely death of one of their scions. During a party game, one of them sees a vision of the end of the world. It takes hold in the form of a sort of inversion of Rapture Christianity. This group looks forward to inheriting a cleansed world after the unworthy have been purged. Some of them dissent, though.
Jackson's best known novel is The Haunting of Hill House, which was adopted into a classic horror movie, a dodgy remake, and more recently a TV series. I could note that it wasn't just about a haunted house, but a small scientific study to learn more about what haunts it. This is a specialty of Jackson's: people staring into the abyss, trying to make sense of it, and the abyss saying "nope." And it hasn't gotten any less relevant.
Also a miniature work of genius is a dream sequence where one of the Hallorans dreams that she's the witch who built the house of gingerbread in the woods. She reacts with pure chagrin to the little brats who come along and start eating it.
Jackson's best known novel is The Haunting of Hill House, which was adopted into a classic horror movie, a dodgy remake, and more recently a TV series. I could note that it wasn't just about a haunted house, but a small scientific study to learn more about what haunts it. This is a specialty of Jackson's: people staring into the abyss, trying to make sense of it, and the abyss saying "nope." And it hasn't gotten any less relevant.
Also a miniature work of genius is a dream sequence where one of the Hallorans dreams that she's the witch who built the house of gingerbread in the woods. She reacts with pure chagrin to the little brats who come along and start eating it.
2 comments:
Although I can't say I've read any of Shirley Jackson's work I have been affected by her vision. One of the scariest movies I ever saw, and I'm not into being frightened by fiction at all, was the movie The Haunting of Hill House. The fact that it never showed a monster made it more terrifying than any beast, vampire or zombie since it's always true that the minute a creature shows up one is left to judge the design or the makeup or see the mechanisms that propel it.
I do remember seeing a version of The Lottery, that simple tale about villagers in a small New England community fulfilling a summer ritual withchilling results. It was also creepy, but understandable in a bizarre fashion. Apparently her mother wrote her a letter after it was published telling her she ought to write stories to cheer people up rather than gloomy ones. I guess she had her own reasons for gloom about the ways of the world - or should I say people.
You make The Sundial sound very interesting and the Hallorans as strange as any fictional family could be. The idea of them imagining themselves as the inheritors of a new world all their own is another scary image. I like that version of Hansel and Gretel from the witch's point of view. jackson definitely had some issues and aren't we glad she did. Maybe I'll have to check out a couple of her stories. You've made me curious.
The Haunting is an unforgettable movie. One thing about looking back from the perspective of 2019 is that to a lot of people, not just kids, a black and white movie is a black and white movie. So they might lump it in with the old Universal monster movies, many of which are awesome in their own right. But it's got a different visual style, and it tells things in a different way. And of course it couldn't have existed without the book, which was only a couple of years old.
I liked that short film of "The Lottery." She was married to Stanley Edgar Hyman, an editor. How their marriage went is the subject of a lot of speculation I won't indulge in. But just the fact of being married to a Jewish man and spending a lot of time in conservative small towns gave her a different viewpoint. She was proud of the story being banned in South Africa.
The Hallorans are very much a colorful bunch, albeit not necessarily in a good way. I liked the way she tied things up in the end, or rather the way she didn't. Always an author I'm happy to reacquaint myself with.
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