Actually, the Shirley Jackson work I’ve read most recently is not one that was made into a movie, though you could get a pretty decent short film out of it. Though I have no doubt that anyone who decided to adapt it would go for the supernatural interpretation, which I don’t buy at all. I think “Charles” is the story of a child adjusting, not a child haunted. But of course several of my friends sent it to me when my son started school.

But of course, when people think of Jackson, they think of “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House. Both of which I’ve read, and both of which are fine works that deserve notice. Even if I read Stephen King’s analysis in Danse Macabre before I read The Haunting of Hill House and possibly saw the execrable made-for-TV version starring Dan Cortese, of all people, before I read “The Lottery.” Still, she’s an appropriate choice for Horror Classics month here at Attention Must Be Paid. Even if the only work she’d ever written was The Haunting of Hill House.

There is, however, much more to Shirley Jackson than the horror. For one, I really need to read her two sort-of memoirs, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, a pair of roughly fictionalized tellings of her life as a homemaker in the ’50s. She has a wry, easy wit that I deeply appreciate in addition to the excellent skill with language that is notable in what works of hers I’ve read thus far. I’m very much looking forward to We Have Always Lived in the Castle, not least because Crispin Glover will make a fascinating Uncle Julian. Jackson wrote six novels, four works for children, literally dozens of short stories and essays.

I try to balance, both here and in Celebrating the Living, tributes with those behind the camera as well as in front of it. While Jackson is not as prolific as some we’ve covered, I feel as though she ought to be noticed more. Read more, certainly. The Haunting—the original; I’ve not seen the remake—is a fine, atmospheric movie. I need to track down and watch Lizzie, the first movie based on work by Jackson and featuring fellow Attention Must Be Paid alumna Joan Blondell. But in addition to seeing Lizzie, I need to read The Bird’s Nest, upon which it’s based.

Shirley Jackson died an unnecessary death, one I suspect to be tragically common of housewives of her era. It’s possible that she died of smoking-related complications, but it seems more likely that it was something to do with the barbiturates she’d been prescribed for her anxiety and the amphetamines she sometimes took for weight loss. No one knows what the specific combination of circumstances was, but that seems to have been what killed her. It’s not a pleasant conversation to have, the conversation of how medicine and society failed Shirley Jackson. And some idiot somewhere is doubtless writing a paper about how her demons drove her to the drug use, which you can tell because she wrote horror. As though Stephen King weren’t just painfully normal, outside his own drug use.

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