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devouement 's review for:
The Summer People
by Shirley Jackson
A story of impending doom in the most mundane of situations written in typical Shirley Jackson fashion: subtle and only hits climax on its last page. Is this a dig? It almost is, until I started going through the pages again trying to read between the lines and finally saw how she couldn’t have laid out the city people’s lead to demise better. Amazing how she managed to depict so much through so little.
Would’ve given this four stars, but the cryptic ending bothers me a little too much to go on with it. It’s comprehensible that the point of the horror is the realization of the coming of their doom and in that regard, she ended the story perfectly, but I just can’t help needing to know the extent of that doom and wanting to see what everything had been leading up to exactly.
What I love most about it, though, is how it didn’t exactly go from eden to inferno in the Allisons’ summer lake house road to horror. Everything they lost in the end was everything they never really had. The only difference is it’s heightened, and they finally realize it.
Would’ve given this four stars, but the cryptic ending bothers me a little too much to go on with it. It’s comprehensible that the point of the horror is the realization of the coming of their doom and in that regard, she ended the story perfectly, but I just can’t help needing to know the extent of that doom and wanting to see what everything had been leading up to exactly.
What I love most about it, though, is how it didn’t exactly go from eden to inferno in the Allisons’ summer lake house road to horror. Everything they lost in the end was everything they never really had. The only difference is it’s heightened, and they finally realize it.