'Home' in Dark Tales

"It’s about a woman called Ethel Sloane and her husband Jim, who have moved into what is called ‘the old Sanderson place’. The story starts in a nearby hardware shop, as Ethel talks to the clerk, who advises her not to drive the road to the house when it rains. She ignores him, and on the way back comes across an old woman and a child who are presumably waiting for a lift. She stops and picks them up – they’re bedraggled and smell of rain, and it’s all a bit uncomfortable – then when she gets to the house, she turns around and there’s no one in the back seat. That’s the beginning of the story. It’s a very odd inversion of the usual rhythm, because usually you’d put that at the end. But she’s Shirley Jackson, and she’s brilliant – she’s much more interested in what you might do if this thing happened to you. And Ethel is immediately overjoyed, because now she has something in common with the people in the town, something that they can share. She sees it as currency for establishing herself in the town, but later, where the story ends, she can’t bring herself to mention it. She has fitted into the town – but only by understanding that fitting in here means shutting up about this awful thing and never mentioning it. That’s really interesting. It forces you to consider what happens when you bury something like that. What’s great, too, about the ghosts in this story is that they are really solid, not made of shadow like usual ghost story ghosts. Ethel mistakes them for real people. It’s only when they vanish that she realises. Yes, I love that, too. I think that’s very timely; that’s the element of her writing that really stays. My favourite book of hers is Hangsaman , which I think is a masterpiece. Nobody ever really talks about it. It’s magnificent. Just a really brilliant book. Also, Jackson is really interested in these very unique women, with unique minds. So you have Eleanor, in The Haunting of Hill House , who is possibly psychic, possibly mad, but clearly very sensitive. Then you have Elizabeth in The Bird’s Nest – although I found that hard going – who has multiple personality disorder. Then, in Hangsaman , there’s Natalie. She’s just very bright – that doesn’t make her singular, but she’s trapped in a world where that’s not really allowed. That’s fascinating. Yes, I do. The stories are self-consciously supernatural. I should probably point out that it doesn’t have ‘The Lottery’, in case people are expecting that. The other standout story in there is ‘All She Said Was Yes,’ which is fantastic. It’s about a nosy neighbour talking about next door’s daughter, Vicky, who turns out to be not only psychic, but infallibly psychic. She can predict everything that happens, and it’s a real curse and burden for her. But the narrator of the story just doesn’t understand it, and can’t see it, even when Vicky gives her a notebook filled with her predictions. “The child had been amusing herself writing gossipy little paragraphs about her neighbours and her parents’ friends…” And then the notebook ends with an atomic war. And the narrator just ignores it! She just says, ‘I threw the little book in the furnace.’ There’s so much to enjoy. I like the idea that if you were unerringly psychic, you’d still have to deal with really awful people. The whole collection is great, but I really like ‘Home’, because it’s so striking to have such solid ghosts."