'Just an Ordinary Day'


**** out of 4 stars

By Shirley Jackson
Bantam, 388 pages, $23.95

The grown children of a long-deceased, famous (and famously macabre) author receive in the mail a dusty carton of their late mother's manuscripts. The box arrives with no notice, having been discovered in a Vermont barn more than 25 years after their mother's death. In the carton is an original manuscript of one of her novels, various handwritten notes, as well as several never-before-seen, unpublished short stories. Spurred by this unexpected discovery, the children devote themselves to searching out and bringing together other lost or uncollected writings their mother might have left behind.


Sounds like the beginning of slightly unsettling and decidedly bizarre tale -- the wonderfully creepy prelude to a great ghost story -- doesn't it? Yet these are the very real circumstances under which Shirley Jackson's posthumous short story collection, "Just An Ordinary Day," came to be published.

Jackson is a writer almost every American who's been to high school has read: "The Lottery" is one of the most disturbing and most widely anthologized short stories of all time. Jackson was a master of the unexpected, side-swiping twist of fate, and this latest turn in her rich literary history, stranger than anything one might invent, will hopefully not be her last. For to read the 54 stories gathered in "Just An Ordinary Day," works which span the whole of Jackson's writing career -- from pieces written in early college years to tales put down in the 1960s, near the end of her life -- is to enter into the world of a wholly original, chillingly talented and always razor-sharp imagination; the end proof of a brave, perhaps even visionary, writer.

Even in this remarkably diverse collection, half of which is made up of never-published stories, Jackson's signature style is apparent on every page. Her prose, understated, often elegant, conveys a sense of everyday life gone slightly askew. Deadpan, sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying, a Jackson story is kept in balance by the pull of quite opposite poles: the mundane and the altogether macabre. Her subjects might be familiar -- parents and children, husbands and wives, the inner working of seemingly quiet lives -- yet in a Jackson story almost no one is innocent and almost anything can, and will, happen; irony and darkness are brought together in perfect pitch.

In the collection's opening story, "The Smoking Room," a polite, even bored, college girl has an encounter with the devil in her dormitory basement: "The horns were barely noticeable, and he was wearing pointed patent leather shoes that covered his cloven hoofs. . . . We sat back and smoked for a minute. . . . He was a good-looking guy." In several tales, ghosts, often dead children, haunt otherwise benign, Norman Rockwell-esque neighborhoods. Housewives and sweet little old ladies appear here with alarming frequency, alarming because "Miss Honoria Athens" or "Miss Adela Strangeworth" or the charming young bride who just moved in down the hall are often given to writing life-shattering poison pen letters to their neighbors or are taken with an unnatural attraction to sharp objects: "I wish you wouldn't fidget with that knife," a husband tells his ordinarily docile wife in "Mrs. Anderson." In "All She Said Was Yes," a psychic teenager blandly predicts her parents' car crash deaths: "I told my mother a couple of months ago that this was going to happen . . . but she wouldn't listen to me, no one ever does. She said it was an adolescent fantasy."

Shirley Jackson understood perfectly that terror, real honest-to-goodness horror, often comes cloaked in the banal. Or, as one of Jackson's quietly brutal characters, the sweetly deranged Miss Strangeworth, surmises: "Even in a charming little town like this one, there was still so much evil."

Not all of the stories brought together in "Just An Ordinary Day" are disturbing in the vein of her best-known works -- "The Lottery" and her novel "The Haunting of Hill House." But even in her lightest, funniest stories -- tales in which one can almost begin to believe that the world is a safe, even happy place, after all -- there is always the subtle tension created by lives too sure, plans too well laid, moments in which Jackson will yank the rug from under her characters once again. And she will do it in a deliciously sinister, and always ever-so-polite, way.

This is a wonderful collection from one of our most startlingly unique writers.

Liesel Litzenburger is a freelance writer who is finishing her first novel.

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