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Miss Harper was going home, although the night was wet and nasty. Miss Harper disliked traveling at any time, and she particularly disliked traveling on this dirty small bus, which was her only way of getting home; she had frequently complained to the bus company about their service, because it seemed that no matter where she wanted to go, they had no respectable bus to carry her. Getting away from home was bad enough, Miss Harper was fond of pointing out to the bus company, but getting home seemed very close to impossible. Tonight Miss Harper had no choice: If...

"Paranoia" is a short story by Shirley Jackson first published on August 5, 2013 in The New Yorker, long after the author's death in 1965. Jackson's children found the story in her papers in the Library of Congress. According to Jackson's son, the story was most likely written in the early 1940s, during World War II. So there would have been a constant sense of danger and distrust in the air, both in relation to foreign countries and in relation to the U.S. government's attempts to uncover espionage at home."Paranoia" (audio) - A slowly building short story of horror by...

Literary fiction, the two most depressing words in the English language, leaves very little space for horror. It’s a claustrophobic, dusty attic in a mansion peopled by “serious” writers. Sure, the holy trinity of Poe, Stoker and Lovecraft is held in high regard, but with the passage of time horror writing stopped being taken seriously. By horror I don’t mean just ghosts and witches, but all that frightens us–loss, deprivation, loneliness, mental instability, self-loathing and personal dissatisfaction. That’s where the writing of Shirley Jackson makes a powerful case for the kind of horror that doesn’t depend on jump scares. Her...

I first encountered Shirley Jackson through a single short story, “The Daemon Lover”, which I read when I was 12 without knowing any of her other work. Later, I rediscovered the story, along with the rest of Jackson’s writing, and became a fervent admirer of this brilliant and (at that time) much underrated American author. In some ways, “The Daemon Lover”, from a 1949 collection is a typical Jackson story. An unnamed woman of 34 (though only 30 on her marriage certificate) wakes up on the day of her wedding to a man called James Harris. Impatiently the woman waits...