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A review by librarianinthewoods
Come Along with Me: Classic Short Stories and an Unfinished Novel by Shirley Jackson
5.0
4.5 stars rounded up.
I love short stories and I love Shirley Jackson. This collection of short stories was no disappointment. As odd and queer as I anticipated published posthumously with a couple lectures towards the end. In the foreword, Laura Miller writes “The impression that menace lurks in life’s most familiar precincts, that intimate relations are filled with mortal peril, is the defining mood in the stories collected here.” She also wrote, “The twentieth century’s great art of domesticity and it’s terror, her persistent theme was the unspoken and unanticipated prices we pay to belong, whether to a family or to a community.”
Not unlike most short story collections, there are stories that you are pulled to more than others. A couple I wasn’t as interested in, but that’s not bad for 14 short stories and two lectures. The characters are so well drawn and stay in your head and sometimes in the queerest ways. My favorite ones in this collection were “The Summer People,” “The Rock,” “A Day in the Jungle,” “The Little House,” of course “The Lottery,” and her two lectures.
This collection contained her best known short story “The Lottery.” I remember being stunned by it in high school and have read it several times since. This and “The Yellow Wallpaper” are like no other short story. Both haunting. In the two lectures included, one is titled “Biography of a Story,” about the largely negative response to “The Lottery” published in The New Yorker in 1948. She received hundreds of letters forwarded from the magazine with many readers demanding why she’d write such a story and even wanted to know where these lotteries were held or could they go there and watch. Watch! She even wrote “Judging from these letters, people who read stories are gullible, rude, frequently illiterate, and horribly afraid at being laughed at.”
I have read We Have Always Lived in the Castle and definitely plan to read more of her work.
I love short stories and I love Shirley Jackson. This collection of short stories was no disappointment. As odd and queer as I anticipated published posthumously with a couple lectures towards the end. In the foreword, Laura Miller writes “The impression that menace lurks in life’s most familiar precincts, that intimate relations are filled with mortal peril, is the defining mood in the stories collected here.” She also wrote, “The twentieth century’s great art of domesticity and it’s terror, her persistent theme was the unspoken and unanticipated prices we pay to belong, whether to a family or to a community.”
Not unlike most short story collections, there are stories that you are pulled to more than others. A couple I wasn’t as interested in, but that’s not bad for 14 short stories and two lectures. The characters are so well drawn and stay in your head and sometimes in the queerest ways. My favorite ones in this collection were “The Summer People,” “The Rock,” “A Day in the Jungle,” “The Little House,” of course “The Lottery,” and her two lectures.
This collection contained her best known short story “The Lottery.” I remember being stunned by it in high school and have read it several times since. This and “The Yellow Wallpaper” are like no other short story. Both haunting. In the two lectures included, one is titled “Biography of a Story,” about the largely negative response to “The Lottery” published in The New Yorker in 1948. She received hundreds of letters forwarded from the magazine with many readers demanding why she’d write such a story and even wanted to know where these lotteries were held or could they go there and watch. Watch! She even wrote “Judging from these letters, people who read stories are gullible, rude, frequently illiterate, and horribly afraid at being laughed at.”
I have read We Have Always Lived in the Castle and definitely plan to read more of her work.