From Laura LaVelle, Wonder Shuffle's Culture Editor:

House Warming

Shirley Jackson is most famous for the short story, "The Lottery," which is a masterful miniature piece of horror fiction. Two of her novels, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, are incredibly brilliant, and disturbing, classics of the genre. So it is a bit strange to discover that this writer of the mysterious and macabre also wrote Life Among the Savages (and its sequel, Raising Demons), which are both heartwarming domestic stories.

Shirley Jackson was an excellent writer, and had she turned her talents towards romance or historical fiction or cozy mysteries, no doubt she could have done those well. These works of family fiction are similar in style to Cheaper by the Dozen, and Please Don't Eat the Daisies, and Betty MacDonald's memoirs, and all of Erma Bombeck's oeurvre. (More modern examples would be the many "mommy bloggers" of the 2010s.) The stories within these two volumes (many of which were initially published as standalone pieces in women's magazines) are amusing, intelligent, loosely-fictionalized accounts of the author's family life, featuring the author as a beleaguered mother of four, her husband as a kindly, absent-minded professor, her children (odd, lively, full of mischief and energy) as the "savages" and "demons" of the titles, and a miscellany of pets.

These books can be read as straightforward humorous memoirs of a happy but somewhat chaotic family life. If you look a little deeper, though, you will find that horrible and murderous neighbors in the small town of "The Lottery" are only a more extreme version of the ignorant, provincial, and often unkind neighbors to be found here. A little biographical knowledge of the author reveals that the mild flirtations her husband pursued with college students in these books have much more alarming parallels in real life. (Stanley Edgar Hyman had numerous affairs throughout their marriage, many with his own students.) In these books, they're an affectionate team, but the reality was much more complicated: he was always a big supporter of her career as a writer, but although she made considerably more money, he controlled their finances, dolling out her own earnings to her as he deemed appropriate as the head of the household.

The best of her horror fiction also has an element of domestic life in it: an unhappy home life is much more frightening than a poltergeist for poor Eleanor Vance in The Haunting of Hill House, for example.

In any case, if you're reading these books simply as sentimental stories--they're still very good. The level of deadpan mundane detail and ironic understatement makes midcentury housewifery funnier than you'd expect. But some sadness does creep in. I think it's more rewarding to these books with an eye toward the more complicated mixture of the good and the bad--hardships alleviated by the joy of a holiday, the boredom and frustration of domestic labor relieved by the comforts of booze and cigarettes, the quirky, frustrating, and also utterly endearing personalities of the kids.

In many ways, Shirley Jackson didn't have a happy domestic life--her husband was often unkind; she had a difficult relationship with her own mother, who was also unkind; she was eventually afflicted with alcoholism and agoraphobia, and died young. But these are her stories, and however slanted, there's truth to them, and humor, and sometimes love and beauty.

BOOKS: Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957)

AUTHOR: Shirley Jackson

IMAGE: book cover, Penguin Books