Thank You, Shirley

I have spent the past week reading the collected works of Shirley Jackson, an author best known for her short story "The Lottery," which anyone who attended high school in this country has certainly read and remembers well. It was creepy and odd and unbelievable, yet we all knew what it meant and understood its inherent truths. (The Holocaust, after all, did happen.) I was surprised to find out that Jackson's other stories are even creepier than the one that made her famous, and it made me wonder how she ever got her work published.

I write and think in a manner that is similar to Jackson, something I never grasped before but found out this week as I read each one in the collection of 26 stories. They sounded like me. But I wrote a story that was similarly creepy earlier this year--in fact, funny thing, I titled it "The Creep"--and it was rejected by every magazine I submitted it to for being too, well, too creepy. I guess back in the 1940s, when Jackson lived and wrote and was published in several popular magazines of the day, it was acceptable to hint at mankind's sinister underbelly. But nowadays, what with people having 789 friends on Facebook and 1,257 followers on Twitter and all the smiley faces and the ecstatic online declarations--"I played my best golf game ever!" or "My sweetie and I celebrated 26 years of blissful marriage!" or "I love my kids, they are simply the best!"-- creepiness has been devalued as a feeling worth sharing.

These days, happiness rules, and admitting to unhappiness is deemed too disturbing. But if you ever tire of "having a nice day" and want to explore the down side of life, read these stories. They describe in detail the unraveling of complacency; the craziness, disassociation, and awfulness of feeling apart from an unfeeling society, that each one of us has surely felt at one time or another.