Shirley Jackson books: A reading guide for new and returning readers

Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you choose to buy, it supports the site at no extra cost to you. People who haven’t read her call Shirley Jackson a horror writer, and those who have call her a literary writer. She doesn’t fit cleanly in either, and that’s why I keep reading her. Her books are about women with no way out of the house, the family, or their own heads, and the trap is usually the horror. She published six novels and one story collection in her lifetime, along with two comic memoirs about raising four children in North Bennington, Vermont. Two biographies are worth reading alongside the fiction: Judy Oppenheimer’s Private Demons and Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. Franklin’s is newer and goes deeper. Where to start I’d start with We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Her most complete novel: dark, funny, and odd in a way that looks effortless. If Hill House feels intimidating, Castle covers the same ground through a gentler door. The two novels everyone knows We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) Merricat Blackwood lives with her sister Constance and their Uncle Julian in a decaying family house, shunned by the village since mos...