Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories Of Shirley Jackson [Kindle Edition]

You might be familiar with Shirley Jackson's writing; her novels "Hangsaman" and "The Haunting of Hill House" come to mind, and you would be hard pressed to find someone who had made it through middle and high school in this country without reading Shirley Jackson's short story, "The Lottery," the eerie tale of sinister crowd psychology and tradition gone bad.

Now, we have the first collection of "new" works by Jackson since her death in 1965 at the age of 48. Some published only once thirty or more years ago, many never before published in any form, the stories that make up "Just An Ordinary Day" have been collected by Jackson's heirs from some unlikely sources -- crates at the Library of Congress, forgotten file drawers -- even an old barn in Vermont.

This is an uneven collection. Some of the stories seem unresolved works-in-progress, some mere sketches of ideas still needing to be fleshed out, and several are outright throwaways. But among the 52 pieces here are some remarkable examples of storytelling.

Jackson was a master of the updated gothic horror tale. She could take an everyday situation and inject it full of a sense of unease that would slowly grow into full-blown terror. It's hard to read her work without looking at the world slightly suspiciously. That happily married couple you know - are they thinking murderous thoughts? The quiet clerk in your office with all the cats - what dark secrets does he keep?

In the story "Nightmare," an early bright spot in the book, a young, single woman named Miss Morgan starts her day in the usual fashion: she dresses carefully in her nondescript clothes, goes to her nondescript office and performs her nondescript secretarial work. This day is like any other for her until her boss asks her to run a seemingly simple errand. From there on, it's pure Shirley Jackson. The people on the street, taxi cabs, barking dogs - even a simple supermarket promotional contest - all take on new, menacing overtones.

But while Jackson is known best for her darker work, this compilation shows that she was comfortable working in a broad mix of styles. "My Recollections of S. B. Fairchild" is a humorous story of the troubles of catalog shopping, and several romantic pieces include "The Omen" and "Come To The Fair." And of course, you'll find plenty of simply frightening storytelling here - most notably "The Story We Used To Tell," "The Good Wife" and "Jack The Ripper."

If a few of the offerings are not among Jackson's best (there is a reason, after all, why some stories are never published), this collection is still a lot of fun, and certainly adds to the body of Jackson's known work. She was a gifted, diligent writer, and "Just An Ordinary Day" is a rare chance to see deeper into the writer's strengths and weaknesses as well as a glimpse of an artist developing her craft.