Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  IT

  It (whose title is sometimes capitalized as IT) is an award-winning novel by the American novelist and horror writer Stephen King. At over 1,300 pages in paperback, It is among the longest of his many works. Published in 1986, the novel centers on a battle between good and evil in a small Maine town. Though ostensibly fictional, Derry is heavily based upon the real-life environs of Bangor, Maine, where King relocated specifically to write the novel, and where he still resides. Today the Bangor “Stephen King Tour” focuses on many of the locations that either inspired or are directly included in the novel.

  It depicts the conflict between the “Losers Club”—a band of misfit childhood friends—and an otherworldly evil that emerges every thirty years to terrorize Derry. This “IT” takes the form of its victim’s innermost fear, a conceit that allows King to indulge his love of pulp horror staples. “IT” manifests most frequently as a terrifying clown figure known as Pennywise, but its real nature is stranger by far and strays into the Lovecraftian territory that forms a loose metaphysical backdrop to much of King’s supernatural fiction. The children confront and defeat Pennywise, but three decades later a spate of child murders heralds the reeruption of trouble in Derry, and the adult members of the Losers Club are drawn back from each of their disparate lives to do battle once more.

  The length and complexity of It means that this straightforward good-versus-evil plot is only one strand in the novel. Indeed, Pennywise the Clown is not actually named (except in a single authorial intrusion) until well past page 500. The central plot expands into a nostalgic meditation on childhood, friendship, and memory. In addition, King offers a detailed sketch of a small New England city in the mid-twentieth century, where the threat of Sputnik (the Russian satellite by which the Soviet Union gained a lead on the United States in the “space race”) and “the bomb” are balanced against the prosaic anxieties of adolescence.

  It contains numerous references to King’s wider universe. Pennywise, or another of his species, appears in the final volume of The Dark Tower, while other characters are referenced in various stand-alone novels. For instance, Dick Halloran, a major character in The Shining, appears as a younger man, and one of the “losers,” Eddie Kaspbrak, is mentioned in Misery as a childhood neighbor of protagonist Paul Sheldon.

  King fans often list It as a personal favorite among his works, usually second only to the equally epic apocalyptic novel The Stand (1978). Pennywise is perhaps King’s most iconic villain, and his impact is due to both the huge success of the book—the best-selling novel of 1986—and Tim Curry’s portrayal of the character in the 1990 television miniseries. Critics have also pointed to links between Pennywise and serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who performed as a party clown. The novel’s greatest influence, arguably, is in elevating the figure of the monstrous clown to the pantheon of contemporary Gothic monsters. It remains King’s grandest novel and the most comprehensive distillation of his thoughts on fear, childhood, imagination, and community, which together form the thematic spine of his writing career.

  It was the winner of the 1987 British Fantasy Award for best novel and was also nominated for the Locus Award and World Fantasy Award. In 2017 the first part of a planned two-part feature film adaptation of the novel was released, directed by Andrés Muschietti and starring Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise.

  Neil McRobert

  See also: The Dark Tower; King, Stephen; Lovecraftian Horror; Monsters; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Horror Publishing, 1975–1995: The Boom Years; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction.

  Further Reading

  Drey, Mark. 1999. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink. New York: Grove Press.

  Magistrale, Tony. 1992. “Art versus Madness: It and Misery.” In Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half by Tony Magistrale, 101–133. New York: Twayne.

  Magistrale, Tony. 1988. Landscape of Fear. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press.

  Horror Literature

  through History

  An Encyclopedia of the Stories

  That Speak to Our Deepest Fears

  VOLUME 2

  MATT CARDIN, EDITOR

  J

  JACKSON, SHIRLEY (1916–1965)

  Best known for the 1948 short story “The Lottery” and the 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson was a prominent, albeit controversial writer during the 1950s and 1960s. Her legacy is largely as an author of horror and supernatural fiction, but Jackson’s oeuvre crossed genres, from the campus novel to children’s fiction to the domestic novel. She is considered to be the queen of Gothic literature in the twentieth century. With her husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, Jackson raised four children, and the couple moved several times, most notably to North Bennington, Vermont, a town that offered inspiration for her writing. Though she died in 1965 at the relatively young age of forty-eight, she was prolific.

  “The Lottery”: Picture-Perfect Town with a Sinister Secret

  “The Lottery,” first published on June 26, 1948, in The New Yorker, is one of Jackson’s best-known works, establishing her as a writer of horror and the macabre. It takes place on one day—June 27—in an unnamed small American town. The town is presented as completely normal and innocuous, as the reader is introduced to different townspeople, all of whom appear to be preparing for some sort of festival or town ritual, known only as the lottery. The tone becomes increasingly sinister until it is clear what is happening: the unlucky winner of the lottery will be stoned to ensure a healthy harvest.

  The story’s publication prompted a storm of readers to write letters to the editor, expressing their disapproval and outright disgust. Jackson said nearly three hundred letters arrived that summer, most of them negative, although some readers did express admiration for the story. “The Lottery” made such a lasting impression that Jackson received attention over it for the rest of her life from readers demanding answers to why she wrote it. She would eventually say that she had hoped the story would highlight the world’s inhumanity and violence. A prevalent theme is not just brutality, as seen in the ancient ritual that is still alive and well in the small town, but also the random nature of that brutality. The townspeople have largely forgotten why they even participate in the lottery; it is simply a ritual that they follow because they have always done so.

  “The Lottery” has been adapted for film and television, and it remains one of Jackson’s most famous works. It is routinely anthologized and taught in high school and university literature courses, and fans celebrate “Lottery Day” every year on June 27.

  Lisa Kröger

  After briefly attending the University of Rochester, Jackson withdrew to take a year to write, before enrolling in Syracuse University, where she published her first short story, “Janice” (1938), and met Hyman, a relationship that proved to be instrumental in her career. Together, Hyman and Jackson founded a university literary magazine, Spectre. By the time her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in 1948, Jackson had long been immersed in the literary world and had published several stories; her first national story was the humorous “My Life with R. H. Macy” in a 1941 issue of the New Republic. The Road Through the Wall introduced readers to a theme that would become common in Jackson’s work: an isolated community that is hostile toward or unwilling to interact with outsiders. The novel tells the story of the citizens of Pepper Street, who are all fine, upstanding citizens in their own minds, but who refuse to socialize with those who do not fit their narrow view of the world.

  The same year her first novel was published, Jackson’s most infamous story, “The Lottery,” was printed in The New Yorker. Like The Road Through the Wall, the story introduces a seemingly moral community, but one that annually engages in murder to appease a long-standing tradition. The story immediately struck a chord with readers, many of whom hated the violence
of the story’s climax and wrote letters to the magazine, resulting in the largest amount of mail the publisher had ever received. Though “The Lottery” was widely criticized, the story also gave Jackson literary fame, and the story was first adapted to television in 1952. It would later inspire film adaptations. Though none of her other stories received as much attention as “The Lottery,” a few did garner critical attention, including “The Summer People” (1951) and “One Ordinary Day with Peanuts” (1956), both of which appeared in Best American Short Stories in the years they were published. Her 1961 short story “Louisa, Please Come Home,” a mystery involving the disappearance of a young woman the day before her sister’s wedding, was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Award, given by the Mystery Writers of America.

  “The Lottery” established Jackson as a writer of “weird fiction,” placing her in a long line of writers of the fantasy and horror genre. Jackson, though, defied categorization, as she was just as comfortable writing about her life at home as she was a grisly tale of murder. As a mother of four children and a homemaker, Jackson had a fountain of material, which she collected into essays for Good Housekeeping and a litany of other magazines, including Woman’s Day and Woman’s Home Companion, plus two domestic novels filled with sketches of her life as a wife and mother, often with a humorous tone: Life Among the Savages was published in 1952, and Raising Demons followed in 1957. Jackson’s musings are unflinchingly honest at times, which sets them apart from the stylized and overly optimistic domestic writings of the time.

  As is fitting for a Gothic writer, Jackson was greatly interested in studying witchcraft and the occult, a subject she wrote about in 1956’s The Witchcraft of Salem Village, an account of the events surrounding the Salem witch trials written for children. Jackson would go on to pen more children’s stories, including a one-act play called The Bad Children (1959), which retold the fable of Hansel and Gretel, and two more books, 9 Magic Wishes (1963) and Famous Sally (1966).

  It was Jackson’s novel Hangsaman, published in 1951, that established her career as a Gothic writer. On its surface it is a campus novel, telling the story of Natalie Waite as she attends her first year at a small liberal arts college that shares more than a passing resemblance to Bennington College, where Jackson’s husband had taught. But as the novel progresses, the plot becomes darker as Natalie, a Gothic heroine, is sexually assaulted by a family friend and eventually unravels. The novels that followed all contain elements of Gothic horror. The Bird’s Nest (1954) contains a heroine who, like Natalie in Hangsaman, has a tenuous grip on reality. The book tells the story of Elizabeth, who struggles with schizophrenia and multiple personalities after being molested by her mother’s lover. The novel is a prime example of Jackson’s interest in the field of psychology, which forms a recurring motif in her works. It was adapted into the 1957 film Lizzie, directed by Hugo Haas and starring Eleanor Parker. In The Sundial (1958), Jackson explored the idea of a Gothic mansion, this one run by the Halloran family, all of whom seem to be so removed from the outside world that they cannot be trusted to understand what is reality and what is fantasy.

  The character of the outsider shunning the world in a Gothic castle is one that would become a favorite of Jackson’s. In 1959, Jackson published her most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House. In telling the story of Hill House, a mansion that Jackson describes as having been “born bad” (Jackson 1984, 70), Jackson enters into a long tradition of haunted house tales, following in the footsteps of Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James. The novel inspired two films, 1963’s The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise and considered a masterpiece in its own right, and the lesser 1999 film of the same title, directed by Jan de Bont. Hill House, a haunted house with its writing on the wall (in blood) and mysterious noises, is most likely the prototype for many haunted houses to come, from the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining to the Navidson family’s new home in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000).

  Though not a haunted house novel, Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), which was named one of the “Ten Best Novels” of the year by Time magazine, continued her development of the Gothic. Like many of Jackson’s other novels, this one tells the story of a heroine who has become an outsider to society. Unlike a weaker or more innocent character such as Hangsaman’s Natalie or The Haunting of Hill House’s Eleanor, Merricat Blackwood maintains more control over her isolation in Blackwood Manor, and also, more significantly, over her older sister Constance. Merricat is protective of her sister, defending her against the antagonistic townspeople and a greedy relative, and making a home for the two of them, even as their family home is crumbling around them. The novel spawned several adaptations for the stage, the first in 1966 and another in 2010, as a musical for the Yale Repertory Theatre. Film adaptations have been rumored, though as of 2016, none have come to fruition.

  The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle garnered more critical praise for Jackson than any of her other novels. Despite failing health, she continued to be a prolific writer, participating in conferences and lecturing at universities until her death on August 8, 1965, of heart failure.

  Given Jackson’s quite varied authorial career, many critics find it difficult to categorize her as merely a “horror” writer, out of concern that the title does not accurately represent the breadth of her canon. Jackson does manage to instill a sense of horror in her readers, particularly as she shows them the violence that can lie just beneath the surface of everyday life. Her characters are often on the verge of a mental collapse, and her stories have a profound psychological depth for readers to plumb. Her landscapes tend to be Gothic in nature (i.e., large mansions with murderous pasts), and her heroines are almost always escaping a hostile outside world. Perhaps due to her success in the Gothic and horror fiction, Jackson’s legacy has been relegated to that genre, though late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century critics began to show a renewed interest in her work.

  In 1988, Judy Oppenheimer published the first biography of Jackson, Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. Many readers and critics questioned some of its claims that Jackson suffered from mental disease and possible childhood sexual abuse. Oppenheimer also makes the claim that Jackson’s study into the supernatural and occult went beyond a scholar’s interest, and that she believed in the existence of the supernatural. Many critics, however, take issue with this stance, asserting that Jackson probably held no such notion and citing the fact the characters in Jackson’s works who experience the supernatural are often struggling with differentiating the real world from the inner world of imagination. Some have argued that the question of whether or not Jackson herself believed in the supernatural overshadows her authorial legacy, though this is beginning to change. Jackson’s literary achievements continue into the twenty-first century, with her estate releasing previously unpublished works, including “Paranoia” (2013) and “The Man in the Woods” (2014), both of which appeared in The New Yorker. These stories, along with more of Jackson’s previously unseen works, were collected and published in Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings (2015), edited by two of Jackson’s adult children, Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt.

  In some ways, the memory of Jackson herself has nearly eclipsed her writing, as readers are just as intrigued by Shirley Jackson the person as they are by Shirley Jackson the author. On June 27 (the same day the events of “The Lottery” take place), the town of North Bennington celebrates Shirley Jackson as one of their most illustrious citizens. Novelist Susan Scott Merrell wrote Jackson as a character in her 2015 psychological thriller Shirley: A Novel, which tells the tale of the disappearance of a young college student who attends the same university where Jackson’s husband teaches. The novel takes true events from Jackson’s life and the real disappearance of Paula Weldon (which also inspired Jackson’s Hangsaman and “The Missing Girl”) and interweaves them with a fictional mystery. In 2016, a new biography of S
hirley Jackson, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, written by Ruth Franklin, was published, demonstrating that Jackson still captivates audiences even half a century after her death. In a further example of her enduring influence, the Shirley Jackson Award was established in 2007 to be given annually in recognition of superior achievement in long and short fiction in the genres of thriller (particularly psychological thrillers, as Jackson herself would have preferred), horror, and dark fantasy. The first Shirley Jackson Awards were presented at the 2007 Readercon conference in Burlington, Massachusetts.

  Lisa Kröger

  See also: The Haunted House or Castle; The Haunting of Hill House; Shirley Jackson Awards; Witches and Witchcraft.

  Further Reading

  Anderson, Melanie R., and Lisa Kröger, eds. 2016. Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences. New York: Routledge.

  Franklin, Ruth. 2016. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. New York: Liveright.

  Friedman, Lenemaja. 1975. Shirley Jackson: A Biography. Boston: Twayne.

  Hall, Joan Wylie. 1993. Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne.

  Hattenhauer, Darryl. 2003. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany: State University of New York Press.

  Jackson, Shirley. [1959] 1984. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Penguin Books.

  Jackson, Shirley. 2015. Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings. New York: Random House.

  Miller, Laura. 2006. Introduction to The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, ix–xxii. New York: Penguin. http://lauramiller.typepad.com/lauramiller/shirley-jacksons-the-haunting-of-hill-house-an-introduction.html.

  Murphy, Bernice M., ed. 2005. Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Oppenheimer, Judy. 1988. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Putnam.