Authors Like Shirley Jackson

The closest English relation to Jackson's method. Nothing in Rebecca is supernatural, and the dread comes entirely from a house, a servant and a memory, which is exactly how Hill House works on Eleanor. Du Maurier is lusher and more romantic; Jackson is drier and stranger. Read the stories too: “The Birds” has the same matter-of-fact menace as “The Lottery”.

The one book Stephen King put beside Hill House in Danse Macabre as the only two great supernatural novels of the previous hundred years. Both leave you with the same unresolved question — is the house haunted, or is the woman telling the story? James's sentences are slower and more elaborate, but the governess and Eleanor are sisters.

Forty pages that explain a great deal of Jackson. A woman told by the people who love her what is good for her, a room she cannot leave, and a mind that comes apart in plain sight: that is Eleanor's story as well, and Merricat's in a different key. Gilman is more polemical and less funny, but the trap is the same trap.

Jackson's contemporary, and the other great American story writer of the 1950s to end a story with an act of violence that the ordinary people around it make possible. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “The Lottery” belong on the same shelf. O'Connor's frame is religious where Jackson's is social, but both write the polite small town with the same deadpan.

Read him to see what Jackson made possible. The Shining is the haunted house as a family under pressure, and Carrie is the small town turning on one girl. King is louder and far more explicit — he does raise his voice — but the horror still starts at home.

The Little Stranger is the closest any recent novel has come to Hill House: a house in decline, a family in decline with it, and a narrator whose reliability you start to doubt. Waters also writes openly the queer desire that Jackson left as an implication around Theodora.

The Secret History shares We Have Always Lived in the Castle's fascination with a small group that has done something terrible and closes ranks against everyone outside it. Tartt writes at much greater length, and the novel grew out of the same Vermont college where Jackson's husband taught.

The most direct modern descendant of Hill House as a character. Oyeyemi's house wants something, as Jackson's does, and the young woman inside it, Miranda, is coming apart in a way that recalls Eleanor. Oyeyemi adds what Jackson never addressed: who the house lets in, and who it keeps out.

The living writer who most clearly works in Jackson's mode: women's bodies, marriages and homes rendered as quietly horrifying, with the supernatural kept just at the edge. “The Husband Stitch”, the collection's first story, reads like a cousin of “The Lottery” — a familiar ritual, followed to its end.

Sisters is the book to read after We Have Always Lived in the Castle: two sisters bound too tightly, a house that seems to answer back, and a narrator who is not telling you everything. Both Everything Under and Sisters were nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award.