Deal Me In, Week 15: "Birthday Party" by Shirley Jackson

This week I drew the Ace of spades, which led me to another story from The Best American Short Stories 1964. This story, "Birthday Party" by Shirley Jackson, also happened to be chosen for me way back in January by Jay, the ringleader of this little cartomancy cruise.

Shirley Jackson, right? The only two works of hers with which I am familiar are the short story "The Lottery," and the novel The Haunting of Hill House. Both creep-fests, to be sure. So I was fully prepared for this to be a creepy birthday party.

The story opens as we meet Jannie, a young girl on the morning of her eleventh birthday. She's excited to death, and has convinced her parents to let her have a pajama party with four of her friends. Her older brother, Laurie, is not so sure this is a good idea, and moans his way through the whole story about how horrible five giggling girls are going to be. Jannie's mother sets up cots in her bedroom and library, and gets ready for THE HORRIBLE, BLOODY NIGHT THAT NONE OF THEM WILL EVER FORGET. (Shirley Jackson, right??!)

No, no.....it turns out that Jannie and her friends are typical excited little girls that really can't sleep all night. (Oh, ok, Shirley -- I'm sure you're just building up the suspense.)

Jannie has received all kinds of cool presents for her birthday, including her very own record player, and an Elvis Presley record.... THAT MAKES YOU GO INSANE THE MINUTE YOU START LISTENING TO IT. (Shirley, come on, please start creeping me out!)

No, the Elvis Presley record just makes Jannie's brother go insane, when the girls play it half the night. (At this point I'm throwing some pretty insulted looks at Shirley..... she's taking a long time to get the creep-fest going.)

Within a few pages of the end of the story, I realized that Shirley was going to let me down. This is not a creepy story. It IS a (not very) humorous story about five flighty little girls staying up half the night at a birthday party and making the mother crazy with their jumping in and out of bed, their spats (during the course of the night, it seems as if each one of the little girls gets mad at all the others, and makes up with all the others just as quickly), and assorted girlish shenanigans.

I kind of hated this story. Part of it was because I was convinced it was going to be something different than it was, but part of it was that the story came across as a type of half-baked Erma Bombeck story. This story WAS written in the same time period when Erma began to be popular, so I don't have any idea if Shirley was trying to channel that kind of humorous story, but if so, she didn't do it very well. The story was first published in Vogue, so I suppose that should have given me half a clue to begin with -- Vogue was not then, and is still not, known for publishing creepy fiction. Oh well.

The Deal Me In short story challenge is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

I read this novel as part of the R.I.P. (Readers Imbibing Peril) event, and also as part of the Estella Society readalong taking place all during September.

The only Shirley Jackson I have read before, to my knowledge, is the famous story "The Lottery."  A classic, to be sure.  The Haunting of Hill House is supposed to be a classic as well, but it left me a little cold.  And not in the good, scary story way.

Here's the setup, in case you are unfamiliar with this book: Dr. John Montague is an anthropologist who has taken an extreme interest in supernatural dealings, especially haunted houses.  Hill House comes to his attention as a suitably haunted house for him to study and eventually write a masterful treatise about.  But he needs assistants to help him explore and understand the house.  He chooses two assistants, Eleanor Vance and Theodora, by their demonstrated links to the paranormal.  (As a child, Eleanor lived in a house that experienced a rain of stones for days, and Theodora has demonstrated remarkable ESP in experiments conducted in Dr. Montague's lab.)  The third assistant, Luke Sanderson, is a nephew to the owner of Hill House, and thus an heir.  His presence is the only condition upon which Dr. Montague will be allowed to make his observations of the supposedly haunted house.

Thus the stage is set for what seems to be a typical ghost-hunting story.  And the first part of the book is essentially that.  It's creepy, and a little suspenseful, and I enjoyed that part of the book very much.  Hill House is indeed haunted, and a really creepy and weird place to boot, but it's not haunted in the way that I expected.   This story turns out to be more about psychological terror, and the effect the house has on Eleanor in particular, and it was that part of the story that I had trouble relating to.  It just wasn't that scary, and I was even a little confused by the storyline from time to time.  Many of the supernatural events in the book are only hinted at obliquely.  For example, in one scene Eleanor thinks she is holding Theodora's hand in the dark, to keep from being scared.  Suddenly she realizes that it might not be Theodora's hand, and she doesn't really know whose it is, since no one else is supposed to be in the room with them.  And.......... that's all we get of that.  Creepy, yes.  Scary, no -- because there's just not that much there.

I sort of kept waiting for things to happen like that all through the book.  Scary, creepy things do happen eventually, and some of them are kind of surprising.  Overall, however, I thought the story as a whole was unsatisfying.  Too much is left unsaid, or ambiguous, and that's not the kind of scary story I want.

This book just was not my cup of tea.  It's not a long book, so it can be read pretty quickly -- I finished it in just a couple of days.  There are many people (including masters such as Stephen King) who regard this as one of the best horror novels ever written, and I don't have any reason to doubt their judgment.  The book is short enough that I would be willing to reread it someday and give it a second chance.  But for now, my verdict is.... eh.

If you've read it, and liked it, and maybe understood it better than I did, please talk about it in the comments!