When Things Get Dark edited by Ellen Datlow

(Titan Books, 2021)

Reviewed by Jeremy Nelson

Jackson’s work has undergone a much-deserved renaissance in the world of film. The critical success of Netflix’s 2018 miniseries The Haunting of Hill House has opened the doors to a number of projects inspired by Shirley Jackson’s work and life. When Things Get Dark brings the same spirit to the short story form, with a table of contents brimming with talent.

Datlow makes it clear in her introduction that she sought more than mere pastiches of Jackson’s work and wanted contributors to “distill the essence of Jackson’s work into their own work, to reflect her sensibility.” In that spirit, none of the stories draw from Jackson’s personal life.

These stories present everything from the grotesquery depicted in Paul Tremblay’s “The Party” to the quiet quotidian dread of Elisabeth Hand’s “For Sale By Owner.” Hand’s story is one of the standouts of the collection, and the premise of three middle-aged women exploring empty properties blends seamlessly into the uncanny. The way Hand unsettles the reader as progressively stranger events unfold evokes how Jackson’s own work thrives on the edge of knowability.

Common to many of these stories is an undercurrent of domestic dread: the horror of being shackled by institutions and expectations, where women struggle against the encroaching of the boundaries of their bodies, of their sense of self. Genevieve Valentine’s standout “Sooner or Later, Your Wife Will Drive Home” distills these threats into a kaleidoscopic view of the threats facing women who dare to travel alone, and how illusory our society’s progress may well be. Sometimes these threats are self-inflicted, as in the opening story “Funeral Birds” by M. Rickert, which patiently unveils the crime at its heart and the guilt-driven haunting that follows.

Karen Heuler, in “Money of the Dead,” marries a ghost story with an examination of how love can disguise the consuming impulses of possession and control—and does so with a matter-of-fact rendering that highlights the horrors that we live with and fail to notice—or worse, unthinkingly forgive.

“The Lottery,” arguably Jackon’s best-known work, is alluded to by Joyce Carol Oates’s “Take Me, I Am Free”, but it is Cassandra Khaw’s “Quiet Dead Things'' that deals most directly with the social dynamics in Jackson’s story. With elevated diction, Khaw depicts a small town succumbing to xenophobia and isolationism and so condemns themselves to disaster—these impulses, as Khaw compellingly illustrates, are as relevant to our current politics as ever.

Benjamin Percy’s “Hag”, the longest in the collection, weaves together folk horror, small-town isolation, and domestic conflict that recalls some of Jackson’s most affecting work. As with the other stories in the collection, there’s an implicit awareness of how horror, as a genre, once thoughtlessly typecast certain groups of people into roles as victims and perpetrators. Having these expectations subverted, as in Seanan McGuire’s “In the Deep Woods, The Light is Different There”, and in John Langan’s “Something Like Living Creatures”, is satisfying not only for challenging long-established norms but because of the opportunities it offers writers to exercise their imagination in breaking from the mold.

The collection closes with Kelly Link’s “Skinder’s Veil,” a fable-threaded tale nevertheless grounded in our present time. A beleaguered grad student stays in Skinder’s house with two conditions: to let in any of Skinder’s friends, and to never let Skinder himself into the house. Link weaves storytelling magic to make each strange encounter believable—and progressively more unsettling. The ending is poetic, and resonant with that ineffable logic that drives our dreams. It’s a story I already know will stick with me.

Titan Books have designed a beautiful hardback, and beneath the dust jacket the silhouette of Jackson’s signature glasses is used as a motif on the cover front and in the endpapers. Within these covers are stories that celebrate the range of Jackson’ work. Paganism, folk horror, hungry houses and hauntings: eighteen perspectives frame, almost by negative space, a sense of Jackson’s inimitable eye for the uncanny, and her legacy.

Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.