Friday Flashback: Rec. #134: Just an Ordinary Day

I decided to start doing Friday Flashbacks in case you missed some early posts the first time around. You're busy; I understand.

What: Just an Ordinary Day, a collection of previously unpublished and/or uncollected stories by Shirley Jackson, is a master class in writing psychological horror. Jackson takes great pleasure in slamming together the mundanely domestic and the unsettlingly surreal (or the mundanely surreal and the unsettlingly domestic) to see which explodes first.

Comparable to: The comedic stories (both domestic and surreal) have an Angela Thirkell tone. The dark stories (both domestic and surreal) are dry and disturbing, perhaps even more so than her most famous works --- the novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle and the much-anthologized story "The Lottery."

Representative quote: "He was still smoking a little, but otherwise he seemed quite a charming young man. The horns were barely noticeable, and he was wearing pointed patent leather shoes that covered his cloven hoofs." --- "The Smoking Room"

You might not like it if: You don't like starting a story without knowing whether it's going to make you laugh or freak you out. (The titles are no help in this regard, by the way.)

How to get it: It's easy enough to find some sort of collection of Shirley Jackson stories, but this one really is a nice mix of genres, if you like that sort of thing as much as I do. It's also Kindle-able.

[Originally posted 5/25/11.]