Mar 24 2022
I am genuinely impressed by the way this collection invokes the spirit of Shirley Jackson. So many of the stories read as if they might have come from her pen, so seamlessly do they fit into the dark atmosphere engendered by stories such as The Haunting Of Hill House, The Lottery and We Have Always …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/03/24/when-things-get-dark-edited-by-ellen-datlow/
Dec 14 2020
I don’t know whether the authors invited to write companion essays to classic novels have any say in the placement of their pieces in relation to the main text, but God Almighty, is it irritating to read a spoiler-filled introduction by Laura Miller when at least Jonathan Lethem’s smug thoughts on We Have Always Lived …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/12/14/the-haunting-of-hill-house-by-shirley-jackson/
Sep 21 2020
It’s starting to get cold here in Maryland, so time for my thoughts to turn to hot soups and snuggling under the covers with a creepy tale or two! First up, an American classic that isn’t, perhaps, as overtly scary as its reputation has made it out to be, tho many literary people have certainly …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/21/we-have-always-lived-in-the-castle-by-shirley-jackson/
Sep 04 2015
Just shy of halfway through Life Among the Savages, Shirley Jackson relaxes and lets her characters — her immediate family, for this is a memoir — tell their stories without too much authorial interference. Before that, the set pieces feel a bit like set pieces, and it has a sense of an author putting on …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/09/04/life-among-the-savages-by-shirley-jackson/
Aug 26 2015
Raising Demons is perfect. There are two other books I can think of that I regularly describe as perfect – Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera — and now I have a third. It is possible that if I took out my jeweller’s loupe, I could find an imperfection, an infelicitous word here, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/08/26/raising-demons-by-shirley-jackson/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire