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A review by wille44
Come Along with Me: Classic Short Stories and an Unfinished Novel by Shirley Jackson
4.5
Come Along With Me is a fantastic collection that captures and highlights Jackson's myriad of talents: her atmospheric and creepy short stories, her humorous slice of life stories, and her wry and insightful essays. The titular unfinished novel, Come Along With Me, is notable in how much of a departure it was from her prior works. Still retaining a horror factor, the story orbited a very un-Shirley Jackson protagonist, instead of a mousey, neurotic woman we instead have a loud, brash, and funny con-woman bowling about, brimming with lively chaos. It seems in this work Jackson was finally bridging her horror and comedic writing into a unified tale, and it really is a bitter shame that she never got to complete it.
The rest of the collection is mostly her short form work, stories in which she is immediately able to establish an atmosphere of dread and foreboding in the most mundane and domestic of settings. Few authors are better at exposing the tenuous mental and moral underpinnings of social norms as Jackson is, cutting to the heart of human nastiness, neuroses, and crippling instability behind the veneer of decency and decorum. Stories such as Louisa, Please Come Home, The Summer People, and I Know Who I Love plumb the depths of people's capacity to hurt each other, while tales such as A Visit and The Rock do the same with a strain of the supernatural for good measure. This is an incredibly strong collection, there are no weak links here to be found.
We also get a few wonderful stories of Jackson's domestic comedy writings, a criminally under-read and undiscussed aspect to her as a person and a writer. Her stories of juggling her writing career with caring for a houseful of children and all the demands of motherhood in the '50s are told with a rollicking pace, sparkling wit, and affection. They are wonderful to read here alongside her spookier fare, and her handful of essays at the end are also excellent to contextualize both her styles of storytelling. This is really a perfect collection, a capsule of all Jackson's strengths, and her work at it's best.
The rest of the collection is mostly her short form work, stories in which she is immediately able to establish an atmosphere of dread and foreboding in the most mundane and domestic of settings. Few authors are better at exposing the tenuous mental and moral underpinnings of social norms as Jackson is, cutting to the heart of human nastiness, neuroses, and crippling instability behind the veneer of decency and decorum. Stories such as Louisa, Please Come Home, The Summer People, and I Know Who I Love plumb the depths of people's capacity to hurt each other, while tales such as A Visit and The Rock do the same with a strain of the supernatural for good measure. This is an incredibly strong collection, there are no weak links here to be found.
We also get a few wonderful stories of Jackson's domestic comedy writings, a criminally under-read and undiscussed aspect to her as a person and a writer. Her stories of juggling her writing career with caring for a houseful of children and all the demands of motherhood in the '50s are told with a rollicking pace, sparkling wit, and affection. They are wonderful to read here alongside her spookier fare, and her handful of essays at the end are also excellent to contextualize both her styles of storytelling. This is really a perfect collection, a capsule of all Jackson's strengths, and her work at it's best.