Nora Yoon ’27 is a Chemistry major. They enjoy writing poetry for the campus literary magazine, The Gallery and reading whatever books have a good vibe to them. They also like sitting by large bodies of water, drinking lots of coffee and overthinking movies, songs and things in general. Contact them at giyoon@wm.edu.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
When you sit down with a new book and a cup of coffee in an idyllic cafe, you sometimes hope to feel connected to the world at large — brought into the universal human experience by an intelligent arrangement of plotlines and words that transmits something unspeakable but true: feelings that were latent inside you until you suddenly feel them shining back at you in a book. Through the reaches of literary exertion, long-dead writers — along with those still living — can affect you, using their powers of expression and intuition to make you feel like the whole world is humming with the stark reality of peace and coherence. And sometimes a new book can grin as it awakens and induces buried feelings of dread and terror through the same devices.
“Dark Tales” by Shirley Jackson is one of the latter books. Though I’d read (along with probably most American middle-schoolers) Jackson’s famous short story “The Lottery,” I’d never really heard of her work until this year when my favorite artist, Mitski, released a list of influences for her recent album; one of them was a Jackson’s novel, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle.” When I went to the bookstore to find the novel, it was unfortunately absent, so I instead opted for a collection of Jackson’s short stories, “Dark Tales.” I opened it up to such lovely, warm titles, like “Paranoia,” “The Possibility of Evil” and “Jack the Ripper.”
Somehow, even these titles failed to warn me just how disturbing and sad the contents were. Even with a relatively mild one, like “The Good Wife,” Jackson opens the story with a domestic scene only to callously reveal that the titular “Good Wife” is kept under lock and key by her obsessive, cowardly husband. “The Bus” follows the horribly dismal and cruel world of an old woman trying to get home, laughed at and degraded by everybody she meets. In others, like “The Beautiful Stranger” and “The Summer People,” while nothing much happens in the ordinary, domestic settings, one feels that something is terribly wrong by the reticent description that Jackson gives to her subjects. And yet, in stories like “The Beautiful Stranger,” where a woman feels a sense of alienation from the charade of domestic bliss with her husband and children, there are moments of shocking grace. The story closes with the woman exiting a cab to her suburban home, only to realize — or not realize — that she cannot recognize the house in front of her:
“The evening was very dark, and she could see only the houses going in rows, with more rows beyond them and more rows beyond that, and somewhere a house which was hers, with the beautiful stranger inside, and she lost out here.”
Alienation and loneliness are piercing themes throughout most of the stories; this unshakeable and glib sense of isolation envelops the characters of stories like “The Bus,” or in a particularly affecting story, “Louisa, Please Come Home,” where Louisa, a college girl, runs away from home and returns years later on a whim. Upon meeting her family, however, they insist that she’s an impostor, looking to collect reward money, and after a moment of incredulity, Louisa accepts this new reality and apologizes for wasting their time before leaving. And again, Jackson mercilessly twists the knife, ending the story with the absurd reality that the story posits:
My mother still talks to me on the radio, once a year, on the anniversary of the day I ran away. ‘Louisa,’ she says, ‘Please come home. We all want our dear girl back, and we need you and miss you so much.’
Finally, in a select few stories (“The Story We Used to Tell,” “A Visit” and “The Man in the Woods”) Jackson’s imagination overcomes her tendency toward realism; elaborate, fantastical settings exaggerate the usual gothic settings of her work. In these works, physical magic begins to leak into the rational world: people entranced by a painting find themselves falling suddenly into it and are trapped until committing dark acts to escape; intricately tiled rooms in a New England mansion somehow illustrate one of the mansion’s visitors decades before she enters; a young man traveling through the woods accepts a meal in a cabin and binds himself to challenge the patriarch of the estate in violent battle.
Jackson is perhaps at her most powerful here, released from the constraints of logic and allowing the emotional instinct towards darkness to create the story’s world according to its own rules. The result feels dangerously real, entrancing and intoxicating while touching on a deep fear of the ultimate fragility of our worlds. In “Dark Tales,” you cannot escape from this fundamental weakness of human life, as Jackson demonstrates again and again, that every comfort and familiarity can be stripped away, and everyone can be made to feel alone and afraid.
