Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Shirley Jackson occupies a territory that lies between so many kinds of writing that her books are hard to categorize, and our world does not deal well with anything that can’t be labeled in a word or two. There is no easy jargon to describe what she does as a writer. She is called a writer of horror but anyone reading the novels that are better known than this one might wonder what all the fuss is about – no blood, no vampires, no ghosts. The implication that there might be ghosts. The certainty that the surface of a place – like Hill House, or in this case, the home of Natalie Waite – undulates with the presence of something unsettling just beneath. Here is writing of a fine, highly literary quality with a vision that one struggles to find a word for – odd? eerie? There is nothing about Jackson that can be taken lightly; her paragraphs are marvels of complexity, her sentences perfectly formed, and her ability to observe a scene, to dissect it, is surgical. She brings to the adolescence of Natalie a disturbing sense of something having been wrong in her relationship with her family, her father, all along, and yet how does one define it? Then in the latter part of the novel it is as if the world dissolves into something increasingly formless. I have met young people like this poor girl, lost in families that have strangled their being, and have been grateful for the relative indifference of my own parents. God save us all from parents who want to shape our every thought and moment. I would be satisfied to praise this novel more highly if I were certain what it was. But as writing it is about as fine as a person can want. She is not Stephen King (whom I also admire); her idea of horror is far more subterranean, and, indeed, I wonder whether she found herself surprised to be described as a writer of horror fiction at all. Her purposes are much deeper than that. It will be good to discover more of her.