2021 Bram Stoker Awards(R) Nominee for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction
From the short story «The Lottery» to the masterworks The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jacksons popular, often bestselling works experimented with popular generic forms (melodrama, folktale, horror, the Gothic, and the Weird) to create a uniquely apocalyptic vision of America and its contradictions.
With a Foreword by award-winning Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin, this collection features comprehensive critical engagement with Jacksons works, including those that have received less scholarly attention. Among these are the novels The Road Through the Wall, The Birds Nest, and Hangsaman, as well as Jacksons historical study, The Witchcraft of Salem Village. Also included are essays on Jacksons darkly humorous collections Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, on Stephen Kings «literary friendship» with Jackson, on the little-known film adaptations Lizzie (1957) and Hosszś Alkony (Long Twilight) (1997), and the first-ever extended analysis devoted to Jacksons unpublished satirical cartoon sketches.
The collections five sections focus on Jacksons style, key themes, and influence; her politics and poetics of space; her treatment of the «monstrous» mother and monstrousness of motherhood; her representations of outsiders and minorities; and moving-image adaptations of her work.
