Munk and the Woozle

I wanted to read Come Along With Me: Classic Short Stories and An Unfinished Novel , by Shirley Jackson , for multiple reasons. The first reason was that I'd read  a  few  critical  articles  that described Jackson (who wrote most of her work during the 1950's) as a sort of proto-second-wave feminist: someone who smuggled subversive visions of women's secret inner turmoils into the pages of bourgeois magazines like The New Yorker and Mademoiselle. Since I'm a young woman who's interested in feminism - and since I'm a poet and short-story-writer myself - I was hoping that Jackson's writing would inspire me, or even influence me. The second reason that I wanted to read Come Along With Me , though, was that I thought the stories in it were all going to be spooky . I hadn't read any of Jackson's short stories before, but I had read her 1959 novel The Haunting Of Hill House . I'd loved that book, and considered it to be one of the few truly eerie a...

Our inaugural book was the Woozle's pick and right out of the gate, she exposed me to an author and a genre (horror) that were new to me. Shir ley Jackson  seems to have led an interesting but sad life, and one that challenges the widely-held  " Father Knows Best " version of  the 1950's. The stories subtly scrape away at the veneer of '50's mores to expose disturbing and creepy undercurrents. Some of the stories (for example,  The Bus,  and A Visit ) invoke the supernatural but some, like Island,  and Louisa, Please Come Home, expose the horrific in human nature and the desperation in everyday life, which may, in the end, be scarier.