horror, page 2 of 66

Subtitled “My Year of Fear with Stephen King”, this is not a memoir about being kidnapped by a world-famous author and kept in his cellar—nor, Misery-wise, the other way round—but the result of spending time perusing King’s archive of early drafts to learn about his writing process. In 2017 Caroline Bicks became the first Stephen E King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine (not an electric chair, presumably), though not because her own work had any particular relevance to King’s. A Shakespeare scholar, she had, for instance, written about how the workings of adolescent girls’ minds are presented in Shakespeare’s plays. She was initially told not to contact King, but out of the blue he contacted her, agreed to speak to her students, and later invited Bicks to make use of his archive. She took the opportunity to revisit some of King’s works (which she’d read, and been duly terrified by, in her younger years), then to trace the evolution of certain key (usually horrific) scenes via their earlier drafts. The works she looks at (which she does in reverse chronological order) are Pet Sematary (published 1983, written 1979), The Shining (1977), Night Shift (published 1978, collecting stories that appeared from 1968), Salem’s Lot (1975) and Carrie (1974).

Coming from a discipline which demands a close examination of the use of language, Bicks is well-placed to pay attention to an aspect of King’s work which hasn’t, I’d guess, been examined quite so closely before. As King said—or quoted Amy Tan as saying—in On Writing, “No one asks about the language.” Here, Bicks does.

For instance, looking at the sound of a certain group of words King uses in Pet Sematary, in a scene where the protagonist is disinterring a corpse:

When he revised the line, placing “grating” next to “full of dirt,” he created a word-cluster that echoes the book’s signature soundtrack to all of its awful acts of digging and burying: dirt/grit/gritting/grating/grave/gravel.

One thing I was interested to read is that the tendency, in King’s horror scenes, was for him to strip back the language and pare away the more egregious details, to focus the terror on certain key images. In some cases—The Shining, for instance—this involved removing the explicit appearance of the supernatural to leave as much room for a psychological interpretation as possible. This was particularly interesting to me, as I’ve always preferred King’s subtler horrors to his more overblown excesses of the supernatural (Duma Key really put me off, but re-reading It most highlighted the difference). If I thought about it at all, I’d have assumed the excess details came from tinkering with a scene once it was written, trying to milk it for terror, but it seems the opposite happens: King lets it all out on the page, then sorts through and refines the resultant splattery mess. (I can’t help thinking, at this point, of Pinhead searching through the remains of a recently-torn-apart Uncle Frank in Hellraiser, and re-assembling the recognisable pieces.)

Another, subtler, example of this is Salem’s Lot, where Bicks detects a slight but significant shift in the locus of the horror. In earlier drafts, a cosy small town is explicitly invaded by a foreign evil; subsequent drafts refine this to promote the feeling of the small town as having an evil potential of its own, which is brought to the fore by the vampire infestation:

All of these edits make the town an agent of its own destruction rather than a victim of an outsider’s malevolence. As King recrafts this series of scenes, he turns a more magnified, critical eye to the homegrown nature of small-town horrors.

Thus the town of Salem’s Lot becomes one of King’s many “bad places”, alongside the Overlook Hotel in The Shining and Derry in It, and the book itself picks up a little more thematic depth.

The most surprising change, for me, was in Carrie, where the burgeoning of Carrie’s psychic powers was at first accompanied by an increasingly grotesque physical transformation. In the earliest draft, as Carrie starts to consciously develop her powers, she feels bumps sprouting at her temples and her whole skull becoming soft. By the end of that version of the novel, she’s sprouted a full pair of demonic horns, her body has atrophied and her head become a transparent covering over a massively swollen brain. (King tells Bicks he was inspired by the 1957 film The Brain From Planet Arous.) Subsequent drafts removed this way-over-the-top image, thus pulling the whole novel back from what would, I’m sure, have made Brian De Palma’s adaptation more laughable than frightening (and, I’d guess, made King’s novel not as successful). It also has the effect of keeping Carrie empathetically human, rather than making her a literal demon.

Another evolution Bicks notes—and one that plays to her strengths as someone who’s studied Shakespeare’s presentation of adolescent “brainwork”, as she terms it—is how the character of Ben in Salem’s Lot ages from draft to draft, raising him from a five-year-old in the first to a nine-year-old in the last:

This maturation matters, because it allows King to sharpen his focus on what kids can do with their brains once they’ve made it past the most vulnerable years of childhood but haven’t yet become myopically rational (and possibly amoral) grown-ups.

King has always been drawn to capable kids as protagonists (It being the obvious example, The Institute a particular favourite of mind), and it seems this evolution of Salem’s Lot’s Ben was part of his finding the perfect age for these child heroes:

Only a kid of a certain age, King suggests, could combine the expansive imagination of a child (this monster is real) with the emerging rational abilities of an adult (and this is what you need to do to save yourself from it).

Bicks got to ask King some questions directly—via email mostly, which allowed him sometimes not to answer, but also via a video interview at the end of it all—and in one of his emails he highlighted another aspect of his work I’ve long noticed. I think of it as his use of catchphrases. Often not explicitly related to the action, they acquire, through repetition, a multiplicity of meanings or implications. Asked about it, King said, “I like repetition. Repetition = resonance.”

There are a few snippets of trivia about the books here, too. Carrie, for instance, was initially set in Massachusetts, not Maine. (A subtlety lost on me, as I know neither, and they don’t seem that far apart.) And the vampire Barlow in Salem’s Lot, was initially called Sarlinov—a more foreign-sounding, even Cold-War-evoking, name. (I can’t help wondering if the final name was taken from Lovecraft’s friend Robert H Barlow.)

It’s an interesting book, looking at King from an angle I haven’t read about before (not that I read a lot of King criticism, but I would like to read more). A perhaps more instructive approach might have been to look at works spread across the decades of King’s prolific output, to see if his methods changed; but, on the other hand, there’s something about these early works that seem that little bit more the essence of Stephen King, and this isn’t an academic study (nor a writing manual). There’s something of a fan’s self-indulgence about it, and I’m happy to go with that.

I’m sure there’s more to be uncovered in the King archive. Anyone writing a full critical biography has, I’d say, at least one lifetime’s work ahead of them. Perhaps, then, we’d better leave that task to Count Sarlinov…

The Hungry Moon (1986) was the first Ramsey Campbell novel I read, and the second horror novel I ever read. (The first was Salem’s Lot, and I chose The Hungry Moon to follow it because I wanted something similar but set in England.) It evidently impressed me enough to lead to a lifetime of reading Campbell’s fiction, but when I came back and re-read it a number of years later, I remember being disappointed, perhaps because by that point I’d come to expect something more from Campbell and found it lacking. But on this most recent re-read, I really enjoyed it, and I think this was because by this time I knew what sort of a novel it was and how to get the most out of it. How best, then, to approach The Hungry Moon? (Carefully!)

It’s set in the isolated Peak District town of Moonwell, which is known to get the least sunshine of anywhere in England (some feat), and is also the home of one of the oldest druidic ceremonies in the country, as every year the locals “dress” a deep, fifty-foot-wide pothole with flowers. But along comes a young Californian Christian evangelist called Godwin Mann (based, to some extent, on Billy Graham) who announces his intention to stop this pagan ceremony and reclaim both the cave and the town for God. As anyone who’s ever read a horror novel can tell, ending an ages-old pagan ceremony is always a bad idea, particularly if there happens to be something like a nuclear missile base nearby—and, of course, with Moonwell, there is. But Mann’s evangelistic preaching catches on with the locals, and soon most of them are converted by his brand of public confession, forced joyfulness, and self-righteous piety.

The novel’s main characters are among the few holdouts, including Diana Kramer, a teacher who recently moved from America but has roots in the area; Geraldine and Jeremy Booth, who live in and run a bookshop from a deconsecrated chapel; postman Eustace Gift, who has ambitions as a stand-up comedian; and Nick Reid, a reporter based in Manchester, whose main interest seems to be in Diana Kramer rather than the story of a small town caught up in a religious fever, but who gets trapped in the town as things take a supernatural turn. There are also Craig and Vera Wilde, a pair of ex-nudists whose daughter, Hazel, and her husband (a somewhat useless local builder and security system installer) live in Moonwell and convert, much to the Wildes’ dismay, and eight-year-old Andrew, son of Brian and June Bevan, who run a camping equipment shop, and who convert after June is the first resident to publicly confess—not so much to her sins as her husband’s—when she tells the entire town about Brian’s interest in pornography and the sex games he drags her into.

Mann descends into the cave to oust the pagan evil, but after he emerges somewhat changed, the town finds itself trapped in a darkness so profound it actually prevents people from leaving. Meanwhile, people on the outside start forgetting Moonwell ever existed. (And so it joins the long tradition of supernaturally/science-fictionally isolated communities from Midwich to Milbury.) Because, as it turns out, what the druids did many years ago was bring down a vast, godlike entity from the moon, in a last-ditch attempt to defeat the Roman invaders. Somehow, though, it ended up being trapped there, in that dark pothole, and now, no longer held back by the propitiating flower ceremony, it wants out—and, what’s more, it wants revenge on the entire human race for its centuries of imprisonment.

I don’t think Campbell has written a novel since with such a large ensemble cast (and only Incarnate before it came close), though when I think of blockbuster horror novels in general, I tend to think of them as having ensemble casts (Salem’s Lot and IT being prime examples, but I’m also thinking of the few random novels by the likes of Shaun Hutson and Skipp & Spector I’ve read). But, while this could have been a commercial decision on Campbell’s part—to write a novel more like the sort of thing the booming horror market expected—I suspect it was more likely something he just wanted to try for its own sake (he says in his afterword that The Hungry Moon was “my shot at an extravagant supernatural novel splashed on a large canvas”).

One of the things that works about ensemble-cast, multi-plotlined horror is the way initially isolated characters slowly come together once they realise the nature of what’s going on. But the trouble I had on my second read of The Hungry Moon, I think, is that the nature of “what’s going on” is too diverse to really add up to one thing. Aside from the re-emerged Mann being possessed by the moon-thing, and its trio of attack dogs roaming the town (keeping people from leaving, killing the occasional—very random—individual), there are a number of other supernatural occurrences which are of such a different nature, you start to wonder how Campbell is going to bring it all together. Geraldine Booth, whose child died, has a vision of his gravestone in Moonwell’s churchyard, glowing with its own light; Eustace Gift starts to hear his internal comedy duo Mr Gloom and Mr Despondency talking outside his house. These are storylines that seem to fit more into Incarnate, where people’s private dreams and fantasies become real. (Critic Simon MacCulloch sums up this aspect of the novel best when he says that, here, “a Lovecraftian extraterrestrial monstrosity plays the part of Incarnate’s dream thing as the embodiment of the predatory morbid imagination”. That phrase—“the predatory morbid imagination”—is a good summing up of the supernatural in a lot of Campbell’s writing.) And although Campbell does make these disparate elements fit, in the end, into The Hungry Moon’s overall story, I don’t think it’s quite convincing. Is the moon-thing here simply for revenge on the human race? If so, why does it toy with some people’s dreams and fantasies in this way? And, for that matter, why do its attack dogs kill a policeman who is clearly on its side, but not the people who oppose it? Even more, why, after decapitating the local priest (who was thoroughly against Mann’s form of extreme evangelism), does it reanimate his corpse? Reading The Hungry Man, you start to suspect these are great moments, but they don’t necessarily add up.

One way to deal with this is to say that the moon-thing, being an incomprehensibly inhuman entity, brings along with a whole lot of moon-lit weirdness, and it’s simply beyond our ability to understand. But that’s a bit unsatisfying, particularly as Campbell does provide us with a backstory for the thing (via a cosmic visionary sequence that, as he says in his afterword, may have been unconsciously influenced by the long vision sequence in Hodgson’s House on the Borderland). Ultimately, what the moon-thing stands for is nebulous, almost wilfully primal. Somewhat like the catch-all evil represented by the cult in his earlier novel The Nameless, it stands for:

“Everything we’ve been afraid of since we lived in caves, maybe since before we were even human. Everything we tried to believe we weren’t afraid of any longer.”

In other words… fear itself. It, and the darkness it brings, are “a way of trying to reduce people to a primitive state”. And while, on the one hand, that sounds like a vague reasoning intended simply to get the horror underway, on the other it’s saying something about the novel’s core theme, which is the extremes of religious belief and, as Campbell says in an interview in Samhain 2, “this drive so many people seem to have—to have the urge to question taken away from them, to be told what to think”. (Or as one of the characters in the novel says, “The only way to believe in God is let Him rule your life.”) An atmosphere of fear leads to the need for easy certainties, and that is exactly what a superheated air of self-righteousness provides.

This, then, is why I found the novel just what I wanted on my first read, unsatisfying on my second, but thoroughly enjoyable on my third: it works on two of the three levels you’d expect a good horror novel of this sort to work. On the first level, that of simply telling an engaging narrative with plenty of supernatural incident, it works, largely because of the believability of the characters, which is always a Campbell strong point. On the second level, the level of narrative cohesion, it doesn’t really work, because the supernatural incidents are so diverse, and don’t add up to the entity having some single, meaningful and comprehensible nature. (It’s set up as a thing that’s here “to destroy us all and feast on our souls”, but Campbell isn’t interested in the simplistic sort of kill-scenes this monomaniacal type of monster requires… But, how fitting that a novel called The Hungry Moon should have an absence in the middle.) So that leaves the third, more literary level, which is on the thematic meaning of what’s going on. And it’s here that everything works again. That headless corpse of a Catholic priest fumblingly trying to perform mass in a darkened church makes no sense in terms of the moon-thing’s plans for revenge, but as a symbol of what religion can mean—that very priest, when alive, complained about Mann’s version of Christianity being “The notion that you mustn’t think your way to faith”—it’s a brilliant little vignette.

The Hungry Moon is a big bag of a novel (Campbell himself accuses it of “trying to be too many books”, while Keith M C O’Sullivan in his book-length study of Campbell says it’s “a text that is brimful of ideas”): it’s got folk-horror elements, it’s got Lovecraftian elements, it’s got dream-horror elements, it’s got moments of kitchen-sink realism and psychological horror, as well as moments of visionary fantasy. It also has moments of comedy (some dark—like when Eustace has to joke his way out of a confrontation with the murderous embodiments of his own inventions, Mr Gloom and Mr Despondency—an idea that could, frankly, make for an entire Campbell novel), and satire (as one of Mann’s retinue, encouraging little Andrew to pray, says: “Remember, God likes to look down and see you on your knees.”). The thing is, it’s not any one of these things. If you come expecting a full-on folk horror, or a full-on Lovecraftian horror, or even a full-on monster-takes-over-an-isolated-town horror, it doesn’t quite work.

If you like Campbell’s work, you’ll find plenty of what he does done well here: moments where the supernatural blends seamlessly with the psychological, moments of sheer strangeness or weird awe, glimpses into very real-seeming characters struggling with both normal life and its extremes. Campbell’s penchant for tricksy dialogue is scarily suited to the cult mentality on display here, where believers take everything a non-believer says as an invitation to get the idealogical upper hand, simultaneously tripping an interlocutor up with their own words while making themselves feel superior, as with this sort of logic:

“There will always be people who don’t want to listen to what God has to tell us, and that means they’ll hear the devil and do his talking for him.”

And there is, of course, some seriously good writing:

…the dogs padded out of the dimness.

They stopped at the end of the corridor and lay down. The moonlight through the window of the cell gleamed in their eyes. They were licking their lips, which were wet with a liquid that the light turned black.

Campbell is, in my opinion, quite harsh on the novel in his afterword, when he mentions “the amount of naked absurdity the book tries to contain”. I don’t really know what he means by this as, in a way, the absurd is one of the forms of horror he does so well. If he means the fact that the supernatural incidents don’t really cohere into one meaningful explanation (as Joel Lane says, “The second half of the book plays havoc with every rational expectation”), perhaps the best argument in support of this is that it is, ultimately, just part of its satire on religion: if you think God works in mysterious ways, just wait till you see what this cosmic-horror moon-thing does.

The Sundial is Shirley Jackson’s fourth novel, begun in 1956 (following a couple of years of creative block, according to her biographer Ruth Franklin) and finished in July 1957. It was published to mixed reviews the following year.

The setting, like the two masterpieces that would follow it (The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle), is a large country house, surrounded by a walled-in estate. This is the home of the Halloran family, who, as the novel begins, have just buried their only son, Lionel. Lionel’s wife, Maryjane, is convinced her mother-in-law pushed Lionel down the stairs. She shares her suspicions with her ten-year-old daughter Fancy, and soon the little girl is asking “Shall I push her? … Like she pushed my daddy?”

Whether she pushed him or not, Mrs Halloran now owns the house (her husband is still alive but feeble in mind and body), and says she’s going to eject as many of its inhabitants as she can: Maryjane will be given a small allowance and sent to live in an apartment in the city, though Fancy (who stands to inherit after Mrs Halloran) will stay; Fancy’s governess Miss Ogilvie, and young Essex, who came to catalogue the library, will simply have to leave. Meanwhile, Aunt Fanny—the aged Mr Halloran’s sister—will be moved into the house’s tower, with the implication that she’ll be expected to stay there.

They’re saved, though, when Aunt Fanny, after getting lost in the house’s extensive gardens and having some sort of agoraphobic attack (perhaps egged on by Fancy, though the girl denies being there), seems to receive a communication from her dead father, saying the world is going to end (“Fire and floods and sidewalks melting away and the earth running with boiling lava”), though everyone in the house will be saved, the lone inheritors of a new world, into which they will emerge “safe and pure”.

Mrs Halloran—as well as pretty much everyone else in the novel—accepts this, and allows everyone to stay after all: if she sends them away from the house now, they’ll be killed in the coming apocalypse, and she doesn’t want that on her conscience. It’s agreed not to tell anyone on the outside (and it’s perhaps notable of this misanthropic bunch that not one of them has someone they want to warn or save), but a number of people turn up by chance and are allowed to stay. There’s an old acquaintance of Mrs Halloran’s, Mrs Willow, now a widow and in search of some means of providing for her late-twenties daughters Arabella and Julia, who come along too. Seventeen-year-old Gloria Desmond, daughter of Mrs Halloran’s cousin, also turns up, having been sent for a holiday while her father is away. And Aunt Fanny decides to adopt a random man she finds in the local village—perhaps realising they have only Essex and the feeble Mr Halloran in the house, now—a man she pretends to recognise as (a name clearly made-up on the spot) Captain Scarabombardon.

They start making their plans. Aunt Fanny buys bulk supplies at random—food, medicines, umbrellas. Mrs Halloran issues a page of rules everyone will be expected to follow on the night before the apocalypse and that first new morning, including the need to look presentable: “I want to know that I am bringing with me into that clean world a family neat, prepossessing, and well-groomed.” She talks about “the good impressions we must create”, even though that new world will, supposedly, be devoid of people. The servants will be sent away the day before (to die with everyone else), and the villagers will be given an (unknown to them) farewell party.

The sundial of the novel’s title is the one part of the house that, because it has been placed off-centre, defies the otherwise perfect architectural symmetry. The dial bears an inscription, “What is this world?”, a quote from Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale:

What is this world? What asketh man to have?
Now with his love, now in his colde grave,
Allone, with-outen any companye.

If Jackson is asking “What is this world?” of the world she’s created in The Sundial, then it’s a world of casual backbiting, social power-play, and a constant, outwardly civil cruelty between the characters. And it’s one in which the “love” referred to by Chaucer is already absent, well before the “colde grave” comes to call.

All of the characters are here not because they love one another, but because they’re dependent on Mrs Halloran’s riches. And Mrs Halloran, whose one and only aim seems to be to own the house (“It is my house now, and it will be my house then. I will not relinquish one stone of it in this world or any other.”) presumably lets them stay not only for her conscience’s sake (she barely has one), but because she knows, if she ousted them and they thought they were going to die, they’d most likely force themselves back inside, and maybe get rid of her in the process. Rich she may be, but her riches are her only power, and they’ll surely mean nothing in the new world.

One of the things that means The Sundial doesn’t work as well as Jackson’s subsequent two novels, for me, is that it has no main character, no side to take amongst all these rather icy folk. Hill House has Eleanor, and Castle has Merricat. Neither is necessarily admirable (Eleanor is weak, Merricat a murderer), but both are very clearly, and relatably, human. There’s no one like that here. And not just because none of the characters is exactly sympathetic—that doesn’t matter—it’s because none of them is fleshed out enough. Mrs Halloran gets the closest, though largely because she’s the one in charge. But whereas at the start I felt that her believing in the prophecy was more by way of acknowledging a sort of social chess-move on Aunt Fanny’s part (to force her to allow everyone to stay), by the end of the novel it’s apparent she fully believes it, leaving me unable to work her out, as a character. She declares she’ll be queen of the new world when it comes, and buys herself a gold crown. Perhaps she, too, went insane, just more quietly? The rest of the characters (all but one) are too shallow to be much differentiated. When Jackson began bringing in new people—Arabella, Julia, Gloria, the captain—I couldn’t work out why, because none of them brought anything different to the story. Granted, Julia makes a break for it and tries to leave the house for the city, but it might as easily have been Arabella, or Gloria, or Maryjane.

The one exception to all this is Fancy, the ten year old girl whose self-absorption and lack of sentimentality made me think of her as a proto-Merricat (the narrator of Jackson’s last novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, with whom she shares a certain witchyness). Fancy is the one character with any life to her, and the one character to see through the ridiculousness of the prophecy, and the household’s belief that the world ending would be a good thing. What, she asks at one point, “makes anyone think you’re going to be more happy or peaceful just because you’re the only ones left?” And: “you all want the whole world to be changed so you will be different”, with the clear implication this isn’t going to be the case. Fancy herself, meanwhile, is the only one to actually want the world outside to continue to exist, even to go out into it:

“Who wants to be safe, for heaven’s sake? … I’d rather live in a world full of other people, even dangerous people. I’ve been safe all my life…”

Early on, I suspected the events of the novel were, really, driven by some witchy plot by Fancy. We know she has a very detailed doll-house, and at one point one of its dolls is found on the sundial, pierced by pins, voodoo-style—is she, then, actually manipulating all these events? If she really was present when Aunt Fanny had her anxiety-driven visions, did she in fact create them, as part of her aim of getting her own back on Mrs Halloran for pushing Lionel down the stairs? (I couldn’t help picturing Fancy, with her very detailed doll-house, as a stand-in for the author, who is herself playing with her own little fictional doll-house, with the Hallorans and co. as dolls—and just as lifeless as dolls, too.)

The thing is, Fancy appears in the first chapter, and briefly (and disappearingly) in the second, then is absent for most of the rest of the novel till the finale. And I suspect the reason for this is that Jackson might have sensed how quickly Fancy would have demolished all the other characters, and quite rightly taken over the narrative, making it into a very different novel (a better one, but evidently not the one Jackson wanted to write at that point). Fancy is the one living character among a host of the dead and the dull, and the basic notion of The Sundial just wouldn’t have withstood her little-girl pertinacity and self-interest. So, she’s left to reappear at the end, where she promptly assumes the dominance due to her, as though marking her place at the centre of a future novel (Castle).

Without her, the rest of the novel is episodic and patchy. It’s funny, yes, in a very dark, deadpan, Charles Addams kind of way, but the humour can never be anything more than witty, snipy lines, because none of the characters has enough character to support anything deeper. (You can’t joke about Julia, or Arabella, or Gloria, because what is there to joke about?) Elsewhere, chapters, or even incidents in chapters, feel like they might be better as standalone stories. A number actually suggest existing Jackson stories, such as Julia’s nightmare journey through the absurdly-named Fog Pass in the company of a sadistic and lecherous taxi driver (which could sit alongside a story like “The Bus” or “Paranoia” from Dark Tales). Jackson’s portrait of the nearby village as striving for an outward gentility while knowing its one and only attraction is a house where a child murdered all her family but one aunt (another detail that points to We Have Always Lived in the Castle), captures something of Jackson’s satire on late 50s America, and could easily have been a novel on its own. Incidents such as the Hallorans having to start burning books when Aunt Fanny’s supply-buying requires the library shelves for storage, or Aunt Fanny creating a duplicate of her mother’s house in the attic, or her getting lost in the garden maze, or the visit of a rival apocalyptic cult who are expecting to be taken to Saturn one day, and have had to renounce all metal ornaments—all these could be Jackson stories, and might have worked better standalone than here, in a novel, where they don’t really gel with anything else.

Jack Sullivan in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural is much more positive about The Sundial, calling it “a quirky, brilliant tale of apocalyptic terror”. In it, he says, “Jackson pulled out all the stops… and was not afraid to switch tones abruptly.” (I’d say the tones don’t so much switch as wander.) And while I’d certainly agree “these are some of Jackson’s most intensely neurotic and unpleasant characters” (though without the “intensely”), and that the humour is “more sardonic and pungent than in any of her work to this point”, I don’t know if I can agree that this humour, as Sullivan says, “is irresistible”.

Perhaps if I’d read The Sundial before Hill House and Castle, I might have appreciated its dark humour more—but only because it provides a taster of what, in those final two books, is so well developed. It’s a further examination of her intense ambivalence about the idea of home. A quote from a talk she gave about the writing of Sundial is revealing about this theme in her fiction. Saying that her fiction, up to that point, had mainly been about people trying to get into some walled-off paradise they never attain (those nightmare journeys home), she decided to try writing something that starts within the walled-off paradise, only to find:

“I had set myself up nicely within the wall inside a big strange house I found there, locked the gates behind me, and discovered the only way to stay with any degree of security was to destroy, utterly, everything outside.”

In her creation of ten-year-old Fancy, who welcomes danger so long as it brings her people, Jackson had perhaps allowed a little kernel of herself to defy that sense of apocalyptic, agoraphobic dread which powers her final two novels. Fancy/Merricat—the wilful and witchy girl who lacks sentimentality and can push a grandmother down the stairs, or poison her family—is, perhaps, Jackson’s version of a survivor-character, her perfect embodiment of vitality in the otherwise dark and cruel world she creates in her fiction. The trouble was, the rather low-tension atmosphere of social backbiting and petty power games she created in The Sundial wasn’t challenge enough for the likes of Fancy/Merricat, and the girl had to be left offstage for too long.