Isolation and menace

Shirley Jackson wrote two very different kinds of stories, both of them represented in Come Along with Me, edited by her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman and published in 1968.

When she died in 1965 she left an unfinished novel, Come Along with Me, and while it is only six chapters, we can be glad Hyman saw fit to publish it. These chapters, even the unedited ones, are brilliant, making readers wish desperately to know what happens next, or would have happened next if only Jackson had not died so prematurely. The rest of the book includes 16 stories, as well as three of her lectures.

The two kinds of stories she wrote include the fictional (although many initial readers of "The Lottery" were convinced it might be partly true) and the mostly true. The latter stories are humorous, and somewhat fictionalized, accounts of incidents involving her own family. This collection includes two gems, “Pajama Party” and “The Night We All Had Grippe.“ These are similar in that, besides being funny, both involve people swapping beds all night long. In the first case it's the girls at her daughter's pajama party who, for a variety or reasons, can't settle long in one bed with one bedmate but keep moving around. In the other, everyone in the family is sick, and every bedroom is either too hot, too cold or whatever. No one can get comfortable, and so they stay in motion throughout the night.

If these tales suggest delightfully confused congestion, most of Jackson's other stories hint at isolation and menace. In "The Summer People," for example, a couple decides to stay in their summer cottage past Labor Day, rather than rushing back to the city as they usually do. The locals, who put up with summer people because they support their economy, seem to turn in unison against the Allisons when they do the unthinkable by staying too long.

"The Bus" finds an elderly woman dropped off by a bus driver in a strange town.

In "Louisa, Please Come Home," a teenage girl runs away from home and each year on the same day she listens to her mother's radio appeal for her to come home. Yet when Louise finally does return home after several years have passed, her parents don't recognize her, insisting that Louisa, now a grown woman, is an imposter.

In "A Day in the Jungle," the runaway is a married woman fed up with her husband and her life, but actually desiring only to be pursued and caught and valued by him. A similar woman in  "The Beautiful Stranger" becomes convinced that her husband is an imposter, a handsome man only pretending to be her husband. She thrives on the excitement of this illicit relationship.

The book also includes Jackson's most famous short story, "The Lottery." Talk about isolation and menace.