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What to read next

Beautiful horror books from our Clothbound Classics collection

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Reading lists

The best books to bunker down with this autumn

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Must-read books by women, as chosen by our readers

A flatlay of classic books about dysfunctional families

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Features

Must-read classics about dysfunctional families

An illustration of a woman smoking a cigarette in black and white spattered in tiny blobs of red blood, holding a bloody ash tray.

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Extracts

Terrifying tales: Margaret is overcome by the impulse to kill her husband…

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The Secret Santa gifts famous book characters could have used

A still from Shirley, starring Elisabeth Moss as Shirley (left) and Odessa Young as Rose

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Shirley: the true story behind Shirley Jackson’s novel Hangsaman

Where to start with Shirley Jackson's books

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Where to start with Shirley Jackson’s books

The essential Halloween reading list in 10 books 

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8 classic and chilling tales

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A.M. Homes on Shirley Jackson

The Lottery

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. 
 
Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. 
 
Step into the unsettling world of Shirley Jackson with a collection of her finest, creepiest short stories, revealing the queen of American gothic at her mesmerising best. This selection includes 'The Lottery', Jackson's masterpiece and one of the most terrifying and iconic stories of the twentieth century. 
 
'An amazing writer ... If you haven't read her you have missed out on something marvellous' Neil Gaiman

An amazing writer ... if you haven't read any of her short stories ... you have missed out on something marvellous

The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable

Shirley Jackson is one of those highly idiosyncratic, inimitable writers...whose work exerts an enduring spell

Shirley Jackson was born in California in 1916. When her short story, 'The Lottery', was first published in the New Yorker in 1948, readers were so horrified they sent her hate mail; it has since become one of the most iconic American stories of all time. Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in the same year and was followed by Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, widely seen as her masterpiece. In addition to her dark, brilliant novels, she wrote lightly fictionalized magazine pieces about family life with her four children and her husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. Shirley Jackson died in 1965.

Step into the unsettling world of Shirley Jackson with a collection of her finest, creepiest short stories, revealing the queen of American gothic at her mesmerising best. This selection includes 'The Lottery', Jackson's masterpiece and one of the most terrifying and iconic stories of the twentieth century.

Penguin Modern Classics

Raising Demons

'Hilarious, subversive, sharp without being lethal, and loving without an ounce of sentiment, Shirley Jackson's more-or-less autobiographical account of life as a mother of four and faculty wife (and brilliant writer) is an eternal, comic joy' Amy Bloom 
 
'Our new house was waiting for us, eager, expectant, and empty' 
 
Shirley Jackson skewered the trials of domestic life in 1950s America with wry wit and uncanny precision. In this sequel to Life Among the Savages, her four offspring have now grown into fully-fledged demons. As their house starts to burst at the seams, the Jackson clan somehow manage (without really planning it) to move into a larger home, only to take the chaos - absent furniture, vanishing children, misbehaving refrigerators, an avalanche of books - right along with them.

A housewife-mother's frustrations are transformed by a deft twist of the wrist into, not a grim account of disintegration and madness, still less the poisoning of her family, but light-hearted comedy.

Shirley Jackson skewered the trials of domestic life in 1950s America with wry wit and uncanny precision. In this sequel to Life Among the Savages, her four offspring have now grown into fully-fledged demons. As their house starts to burst at the seams, the Jackson clan somehow manage (without really planning it) to move into a larger home, only to take the chaos - absent furniture, vanishing children, misbehaving refrigerators, an avalanche of books - right along with them.

Life Among the Savages

A darkly funny account of family life from the author of The Haunting of Hill House and The Lottery 
 
'Sometimes, in my capacity as a mother, I find myself sitting open-mouthed and terrified before my own children' 
 
As well as being a master of the macabre, Shirley Jackson was also a pitch-perfect chronicler of everyday family life. In Life Among the Savages, her caustically funny account of raising her children in a ramshackle house in Vermont, she deals with rats in the cellar, misbehaving imaginary friends, an oblivious husband and ever-encroaching domestic chaos, all described with wit, warmth and plenty of bite. 
 
'Jackson's family chronicles have a genuinely subversive aspect ... Read today, her pieces feel surprisingly modern - mainly because she refuses to sentimentalize or idealize motherhood' The New York Times Book Review 
 
'Comic masterpieces, laced with hints of the discontent that lies beneath' Guardian

Is it ironic or fitting that some of the greatest American writing about that venerated and difficult activity, motherhood, comes from a horror writer? ... There is something rather magical about how Jackson managed to so transform suffering into comic masterpieces

As warm as it is hilarious and believable ... Never has the state of domestic chaos been so perfectly illuminated

Warm and funny ... Read today, her pieces feel surprisingly modern - mainly because Jackson refuses to sentimentalize or idealize motherhood

Charming ... You'll see every parenting stance you've ever adopted, every parent-story trope you've ever told or heard, expressed more perfectly than you ever could have ... One of the great memoirists of family life

A housewife-mother's frustrations are transformed by a deft twist of the wrist into, not a grim account of disintegration and madness, still less the poisoning of her family, but light-hearted comedy

Shirley Jackson's 1953 classic about life with her husband and four children in rural Vermont is one of America's most celebrated memoirs of family life. Facing badly behaved imaginary friends, intractable bank managers, an oblivious husband and ever-encroaching domestic chaos, Jackson might want to throw her hands up in despair but somehow manages to turn ordinary family experiences into brilliant adventures. Frequently hilarious, always warm and never sentimental, this is a book for anyone who has ever been in a family.

The Missing Girl

' "Of course, no one would want to say anything about a girl like this that's missing..." ' 
 
Malice, paranoia and creeping dread lie beneath the surface of ordinary American life in these chilling miniature masterworks of unease. 
 
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Dark Tales

Step into the unsettling world of Shirley Jackson this autumn with a collection of her finest, darkest short stories, revealing the queen of American gothic at her mesmerising best. 
 
There's something nasty in suburbia. In these deliciously dark tales, the daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, the loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and the concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. In the haunting world of Shirley Jackson, nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe, from the city streets to the country manor, and from the small-town apartment to the dark, dark woods... 
 
Includes the following stories: 'The Possibility of Evil'; 'Louisa, Please Come Home'; 'Paranoia'; 'The Honeymoon of Mrs Smith'; 'The Story We Used to Tell'; 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice'; 'Jack the Ripper'; 'The Beautiful Stranger'; 'All She Said Was Yes'; 'What a Thought'; 'The Bus'; 'Family Treasures'; 'A Visit'; 'The Good Wife'; 'The Man in the Woods'; 'Home'; 'The Summer People'.

Shirley Jackson's stories are among the most terrifying ever written ... No-one can touch her

In each story in the collection, the everyday world becomes tinted with an odd sheen of terror ... In Jackson's world, the safe house is a trap. Enter it, and you might get lost in the dark

Dark Tales reveals a superior gothic writer ... Shirley Jackson's menacing gothic tales are a joy to rediscover

One of the great practitioners of the literature of the darker impulses

An excellent primer for her short fiction

There's something nasty in suburbia. In these deliciously dark tales, the daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, the loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and the concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. In the haunting world of Shirley Jackson, nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe, from the city streets to the crumbling country pile, and from the small-town apartment to the dark, dark woods...

Just an Ordinary Day

A remarkable collection of dark, funny and haunting short stories from the inimitable author of 'The Lottery'. 
 
An anxious devil, an elderly writer of poison pen letters and a mid-century Jack the Ripper; a pursuit though a nightmarish city, a small boy's thrilling train ride with a female thief, and a town where the possibility of evil lurks behind perfect rose bushes. This is the world of Shirley Jackson, by turns frightening, funny, strange and unforgettably revealed in this brilliant collection of short stories. 
 
'Jackson at her best: plumbing the extraordinary from the depths of mid-twentieth-century common. [Just an Ordinary Day] is a gift to a new generation' - San Francisco Chronicle 
 
'For Jackson devotees, as well as first-time readers, this is a feast ... A virtuoso collection' - Publishers Weekly

Jackson at her best: plumbing the extraordinary from the depths of mid-twentieth-century common. [Just an Ordinary Day] is a gift to a new generation

For Jackson devotees, as well as first-time readers, this is a feast ... A virtuoso collection

A dark, disturbing, wonderful treat ... A collection to press on people and demand they read

An anxious devil, a malicious old woman and a mid-century Jack the Ripper; a pursuit though a nightmarish city, a small boy's thrilling train ride with a female thief, and a town where the possibility of evil lurks behind perfect rose bushes. This is the world of Shirley Jackson, by turns frightening, funny, strange and unforgettably revealed in this collection of brilliant stories from the author of 'The Lottery'.

Shirley Jackson

Eighteen-year-old Merricat may, or may not be, a mass murderer 
 
Six years ago everyone in the Blackwood family was poisoned by sugar laced with arsenic – everyone, that is, apart from Merricat and her elder sister Constance. They live in peaceful, ordered isolation, away from prying eyes in the nearby village, until one day boorish cousin Charles arrives with designs on their father’s fortune. Whether by practical or magical means, Merricat will do whatever is necessary to protect their home.

Shirley Jackson

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

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