Gothic Themes, Settings, and Figures | S. T. Joshi (Essay Date Winter 1994)
S. T. JOSHI (ESSAY DATE WINTER 1994)
SOURCE: Joshi, S. T. "Shirley Jackson: Domestic Horror." Studies in Weird Fiction 14 (winter 1994): 9-28.
In the following essay, Joshi surveys Jackson's works, noting the difficulties inherent in attempting to classify them by genre, and discussing Jackson's horrific inversion of societal ideals of human relationships and homelife in her works, particularly in The Haunting of Hill House.
Shirley Jackson (1916–1965)1 and Ramsey Campbell are the two leading writers of weird fiction since Lovecraft. In making this assertion I am not merely bypassing other writers who, at least in their own minds, aspire to that title—in particular the best-selling quartet of Stephen King, Peter Straub, Anne Rice, and Clive Barker—but am making the problematical assertion that Jackson is a weird writer at all. It is true that only one of her novels is avowedly...
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