1. Someone you have known and hated for thirty years pays you an unremarkable yet somehow sinister greeting at the only grocery store in town, which you also hate.
2. You have committed several murders, yet somehow you are also the sanest and most sympathetic person you know.
3. Every time you see your neighbors, the encounters decrease in friendliness and increase in dark foreboding.
4. You dislike washing yourself, and dogs, and noise. You like your sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cap mushroom.
5. You are being driven slowly but inexorably mad by a society determined to crush your spirit while smiling blandly as it offers you tea.
6. You care nothing for your family but are extraordinarily fond of, and protective toward, the jam jars in the basement.
7. A stranger says something unremarkable yet sinister to you on a train while you eat your lunch of bread and butter.
8. You are in Maine, and something terrible is about to happen to you.
9. Your frantic attempts to free yourself from your overbearing mother/your domineering husband/your suffocating social circle/a house that wants to kill you are useless, as you were born only to be crushed under the wheels of a Juggernaut.
10. A child in the other room is doing something monstrous, and smiling sweetly as he does it.
11. You are in Vermont, and something terrible is about to happen to you.
12. You left your apartment this morning intending to visit the dentist, but have instead found yourself in Hell.
13. Your life is a daily reminder that success and survival belong to the deeply unpleasant.
14. You are having tea with someone, and the act of keeping yourself together is crushing your heart within you. You will have tea with them again tomorrow.
15. You are in New Hampshire, and something terrible is happening to you.
Tags: books, how to tell what novel you’re in, shirley jackson
Related Posts
five and fourteen are TOO REAL
16. You are Hill House, and whatever walks within you, walks alone.
Whew, saved by the fact I do like dogs!
I think I need to sip some tea while mulling this over.
Don’t gloat at Elsa.
You were writing your term paper until the Devil rudely tried to purchase your soul.
The Smoking Room!
Maybe my favorite lesser-known Shirley Jackson story.
“5. You are being driven slowly but inexorably mad by a society determined to crush your spirit while smiling blandly as it offers you tea.”
UNIVERSAL TRUTH.
#8 – but what if I’m in a Stephen King story instead?
You are in Maine, and
(something terrible)
is about to happen to you.
5 evokes The Lottery for me. That story still gets me EVERY time.
Do Flannery O’Connor next!
Seconded!
Alternately, Patricia Highsmith.
@ 12: I have a dentist appointment this afternoon. Clearly I should skip it.
Yes, I think that would be best.
Also, don’t drink any tea. And pet a dog. Just to be on the safe side.
DEFINITE pattern to these columns and New England. Is it safer if I cross into Canada? I just like a beach where you need a jacket! Maybe some rocks!
Once you cross into Canada, you are in How to Tell If You Are In An Alice Munro Story territory, which means fewer unpleasant deaths, but an increase in anomie, hardscrabble Ontario childhoods and Finding Yourself On the West Coast.
Always a catch.
Or else you’re in a Margaret Atwood story. You may escape with your life, but you’ll probably have at least one really unpleasant revelation.
Like when an American shows up at the border with skis in July.
Yes, I’m trying to spread Kids In The Hall Monday to all of Mallory’s posts today.
Whose novel are you in if it’s also bad when someone you like greets you happily at the grocery store, and you’re super aware you haven’t showered or put on a bra under your shirt and jacket, and you respond so awkwardly that they edge away with a weird look on their face?
Is that Dante? It felt like Dante. 10th circle of Hell: the store.
I think I was in the sequel entitled “Like anyone’s gonna see me at Target Sunday morning looking like total hell looking at Star Wars stuff CUTE LADY in the next aisle who appears to be alone and apparently owns a dog so THAT’S cool WOW do I look bad right now”.
What’s the worst is when your town only has two grocery stores and you deliberately go to the Safeway rather than the Fred Meyer because you’re sick and all you want is some saltines and ginger ale and not to run into people, but then you do run into one person and it’s someone you don’t even like and he greets you in a fake Australian accent. And then a year later you start dating him because you live in a small town and that’s just the way things go.
Dante…or AM Homes? There have been awkward supermarket encounters aplenty in her recent books.
I love this. And I love Shirley Jackson. She was the absolute best at evoking lurking eldritch horrors in clean and composed prose. The effect is unique to her.
True story: my father-in-law actually is in a Shirley Jackson story. It’s in Life Among the Savages, the memoir about raising her kids in Bennington Vermont. At one point there’s a description of the neighborhood haunted house that no child would dare enter, except for Oliver. Oliver is my husband’s dad. He told us once about how he used to hang out with Shirley Jackson’s kids while his parents (both doctors in Bennington–one in the town and one at the college) would play bridge with Jackson and her husband. He doesn’t really remember the haunted house, but the reference is definitely him. Some day I’ll manage to pry more details out of him, but nowadays he just shrugs and grins.
That is totally enchanting.
I never found a copy of that one, but Raising Demons was among one of my favorite books when I was a kid.
The methodical killing of children unites your community.
15 could also be John Irving. Although I’d much rather be in (and read!) a Shirley Jackson than a John Irving.
In John Irving, there would also have to be bears. And wrestling.
Everything seems like something nice should be happening, or about to happen, to you (spoiler alert: it’s not.)
I could also be misremembering some of Katherine Marshall’s bleaker short stories as hers.
Jam jars! I think about those beautiful rows and rows of preserves in We Have Always Lived In The Castle ALL THE TIME.
I have always found the title of We Have Always Lived in the Castle compelling, but I’ve never read it because horror novels trigger my anxiety even though I luuuv them, so I have trouble ordering them and wait for them to come to me via used book store. After reading this comment thread, I am pretty sure that when I come across a copy, I will find myself staring back from the page.
No YOU spent your grad-school stipend on collector’s edition colorful Ball jars
You’re in luck! We Have Always Lived in the Castle, despite its extraordinarily creepy title, is not actually a horror novel. It is, however, excellent, so read it immediately!
The Haunting of Hill House, on the other hand, is both excellent and one of the most frightening books ever.
You can find the full text of both of those books online – “Castle” is here: http://englishprofls.wikispaces.com/file/view/We+…
It is indeed not scary and very, very good. It’s good to read twice, actually, because there’s a lot of sly humor you don’t get the first time through.
I feel like these could also be titled, “How To Tell If You Are In One Of Stephen King’s Earlier And Therefore Better Short Stories.”
A stranger says something unremarkable yet sinister to you on a train while you eat your lunch of bread and butter.
A stranger? But you know old James Harris. Somehow you’ve always known him.
consider my mind BLOWN. maaaannn, now I need to re-read “The Lottery and Other Stories” asap.
Your decision to extend your summer vacation by a few weeks has led to you and your husband starving to death in your rental house.
– You have desperately repressed your every unacceptable desire; the thing that frees them also kills you
– You are being treated like a silly child, even if you are a grown woman
– You want nothing more from your life than a place that belongs just to you; even that small dream will be denied you and ripped from you
Your name lends itself to at least three different nicknames.
Your mental state is closely tied to the architectural soundness of your house/place of work.
I love We Have Always Lived in the Castle – I can understand being obsessed with your sister, much like the Kardashians.
Today, you’re a complete bitch, but tomorrow, tomorrow, you’re gonna be nice to everybody.
Shirley Jackson, PHOTOREALIST
I teach “The Witch” as the first assigned text in my methodologies course for English majors, and it’s like a slap across their sweet, fresh, innocent little faces at the beginning of the semester. I have to restrain myself from clapping with delight during our discussions; they’re just so stunned by how nauseatingly ambiguous it is.
(If anyone here hasn’t read “The Witch,” it’s online and it’s three pages. Go. Do it.)
You are new in town and have just broken an unspoken ordinance.
Your dog has deeply wronged your neighbor.
Your mother-in-law looks at you disapprovingly over breakfast.
I have never read a Shirley Jackson story but now I feel like I need to.
yes
you do
My life swings between being a Jackson or an O’Connor story with a liberal dose of Carver thrown in for fun. Number 6 on this list is my roommate. I am number 13.
And if you show the funny and frightening sides of life at the same time and you don’t care which wins in the end, (as long as it’s perfectly phrased) you may be a Shirley Jackson story. And you will be remembered.
11. You are in Vermont, and something terrible is about to happen to you.
Well, that goes without saying.
I was in class with Shirley’s son, in elementary school. This makes me smile…trying to figure out who Oliver is… I am still in contact with her son, via face!
Apart from the award that is named after her, I had never heard of Shirley Jackson before reading The Toast.
That has, thankfully, been rectified.
Your frantic attempts to free yourself from your overbearing mother/your domineering husband/your suffocating social circle/a house that wants to kill you are useless, as you were born only to be crushed under the wheels of a Juggernaut.
Isn’t that, well, life?
Your frantic attempts to free yourself from your overbearing mother/your domineering husband/your suffocating social circle/a house that wants to kill you are useless, as you were born only to be crushed under the wheels of a Juggernaut.
Isn't that, well, life?
I think it might be the child in the other room…
— MrJM
I think it might be the child in the other room…
— MrJM
When I first got into Jackson, I got this big book of her short stories from the library. I had only ever read her horror stories before, so I thought it was going to be all horror stories (I got it for Halloween!).
Man, those cozy domestic fiction stories are fucking ~creepy~ when you’re constantly searching for the twist and expecting every encounter with a neighbor to end in gasping horror. I was in an agony of paranoia without catharsis, it was almost a relief when I’d hit one that did end in murder and madness. I think part of why I love her is that her tone in her horror stories is identical to her tone in her non-fiction or realistic fiction pieces. It makes it all feel so possible.
Plus, she totally pranked me from beyond the grave.
We moved to Maine last year, and on Memorial Day out town had this lovely parade, with antique cars, and tiny horses… but as soon as one of the “Town Elders” got up to the bandshell and started speaking through the wonky microphone I was like- uh oh now is when they start the sorting/stoning
Has LM Montgomery been done yet?
JOURNEYS END IN LOVERS MEETING
ie me finding this post
+You require the smallest possible can of peas.
+Your diet consists entirely of black coffee and bacon. You are either enormously fond of the black coffee or you have drunk too much of it, and now you feel sick.
+You are plump, and it irritates the absolute PISS out of you.
No. 13 is also “How to tell if you live in New York.”