Tuesday 13 December 2016

Shirley Jackson - Observer Item

Horror fiction was once shunned by 'serious' newspapers, but things have changed a bit in recent years. In this article Shirley Jackson's son talks about the recent upsurge of interest in his mother's life and work.

People, he says, often ask him how she could both write a story as dark as, say, The Lottery, in which a woman ends up being ritually stoned to death by her neighbours (it was first published in the New Yorker in 1948), and the light-hearted magazine pieces she produced to support her family. “But I don’t find that strange at all. The answer is abundantly simple. That’s what fiction is. She was a writer, and a good one can use a variety of styles.”

No comments:

LET YOUR HINGED JAW DO THE TALKING by Tom Johnstone (Alchemy Press)

ST 55 features a tale by Brighton's finest purveyor of contemporary horror, Tom Johnstone. And it just so happens that Alchemy Press is...