Shirley Jackson

It gets revealed only seldomly, yet it possesses a devastating power to dispel the illusions that make life taller.

Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House begins no live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under the conditions of absolute reality.

Which is reminiscent of T.S. Eliot's remark, humankind cannot bear very much reality.

The British writer Clive Barker remarked, horror fiction shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.

You don't get cancer.

You don't um get alzheimer's however you do get a lottery ticket for any of those things diabetes alzheimer's cancer you get a lottery ticket every night that you get a bad night of sleep right now the chance of winning the lottery this is the shirley jackson lottery right it's the lottery that you don't want to win um if you get enough tickets at some point you're going to win but again people stepping back it's not missing a night of sleep is not the worst thing in the world it's not great but it's not going to be this devastating effect on your system.

And again, I think taking some of the pressure off can make it a little easier to fall asleep.

Excellent.

Now, we have to give this film credit for this.

It's certainly influenced by different things, right? Shirley Jackson's The Lottery I see here.

I see maybe some Twilight Zone stuff.

But this is the kind of dystopian horror that I think is pretty original.

Almost a silent film Dracula movie.

My favorite is still the original Haunting with Claire Bloom, Julie Harris, based on Shirley Jackson's novel.

And there's virtually no special effects in it.

But you watch that alone at night, and it will creep you out.

All right.

So since you brought up Edgar Allan Poe, I'm also going to bring up a classic horror author, Shirley Jackson.

And I have to give a shout out to Kelly at Woods Hole because Shirley is one of her favorites, one of her favorite horror stories.

So Shirley.

Shirley, if you haven't read her before, October really is, I think, one of the best times to start.

This book is full of short stories.

This is called The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson.

And so the stories are only a couple pages, some of them.

Okay.

And then I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, which feels appropriate given it's nearly Halloween.

She really is like, she is the master of gothic horror writing.

Like it was, it fucking honked.

I feel like I've probably browsed it at some point.

I was looking at it yesterday and I was like, I could spend thousands of dollars on this website because they do like really, really nice like special editions and they get like, they're all like fancy hardcovers.

They get like different artists to do them, but they have a Shirley Jackson collection where it's We've Always Lived in the Castle, The Haunting of Hill House and then The Lottery, which is her like collection of short stories.

So nice, but it's like £180 and shipping is like £50.

So it's a collection of short stories.

It won the Shirley Jackson Award.

So you know

it's going to be...

I have some good horror.

I have never read The Lottery, and that's still on my list by Shirley Jackson.

Oh, that's a good one,

Doreen.

His short stories have appeared online and in print journals worldwide.

as well as numerous anthologies, most recently the Shirley Jackson award-winning Hideous Book of Hidden Horrors from Bad Hand Books, and Ellen Dutlow's Best Horror of the Year, Volume 15.

This is Andy's second appearance on the show, and Steven and I had a great time talking to him about the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Here occurred the frightening and shocking history of Prince Dracula and the woman he loved.

He's done it the wrong way round.

But when he's gone to TV, I thought Hill House, I had reservations and I still have slight problems that... because it's a bit, you know, having a male writer when it's Shirley Jackson's book that you're ripping off.

But that aside, I thought it was quite astounding and it made me quite scared.

And I really did like it.