A look at written versus visual media with a discussion of some of Shirley Jackson's work · 1:57am Jul 20th, 2022
Eh, I haven't done a writing blog in forever. Why Shirley Jackson? I just read a book of some of her collected works, and it got me thinking about how different media are better at doing certain things, which isn't exactly a new idea. Bear with me, after the break.
Years ago, I wrote a story called "In Bloom." For a while, I thought it was my best story. Since then, I've written better things, but over the years, I've gotten a bit oddly decoupled from it. I used to enjoy rereading it among the most of my stories, but I don't much anymore, and it'd been probably two years since the last time when I read it again about a month ago. When I reread a story, sometimes I'll go through the comments again, and I'm glad I did.
A reader said the unreliable narrator, and their situation somewhat, called to mind Shirley Jackson's short novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I'd never heard of the book, and while I should have recognized the author's name, I didn't. The idea did pique my interest enough that I had intended to look up that book, but I promptly forgot about it.
And here I am, over 8 years later, finally reading it. When I saw that comment again, I absolutely recognized Shirley Jackson's name, as she wrote The Haunting of Hill House, which was later turned into a movie called The Haunting in the 1960s. (And a crappy remake in the 1990s, and a series a few years ago that's only loosely related.) I'm not a fan of horror at all, and I've loved The Haunting ever since I first watched it at the age of 11. Well, I say that, but I have an odd relationship with horror. Take horror video games. Would never want to play one, but the lore of them fascinates me, and I've spent hours reading plot summaries and discussions of the bigger picture behind things like Rule of Rose or Silent Hill. Which is even odder, because those are on the gory side, and the only horror I even slightly enjoy watching is pure suspense. And The Haunting does pure suspense wonderfully. It's one of only two horror movies I truly like, and the only one I'd gladly watch repeatedly.
Back to that book, though. The first thing in it is a collection of short stories called The Lottery; Or, The Adventures of James Harris. There is one story in there just called "The Lottery," and the rest later got packaged with it, and to me, that was an odd choice. There is a character named James Harris who at least gets mentioned in about half the stories, but he's rarely a prominent figure or has much to do with the plot at all. Many of them are still good stories, though. I don't know if this remains the case, but there used to be a stigma around here against authors who focused on just one or two genres, thinking that they weren't challenging themselves. Hardly anyone says that about professional authors, though. That is to say it seems Shirley Jackson only writes three kinds of stories, but she writes them well. The first is a kind of warm-hearted, almost banal look at home life. The second is something akin to The Twilight Zone, where Weird Things occur, often making the protagonist feel like they must be the only sane person in the world, and they end without coming to much of a conclusion, just letting you stew in what the implications might be. And the third is unsettling suspense.
"The Lottery" itself got more public attention than anything else she wrote, and she prepared a couple of talks around it to give whenever she was invited to speak somewhere, which were included in the edition of the book I read. I have to say, there was a very vocal "need to know" crowd back then. "The Lottery" does indeed feature an actual lottery, whose purpose is left for the reader to slowly realize. Much of the public reaction was about how a situation like this could ever happen, and it's kind of funny that in the intervening years, nobody would bat an eye at it anymore. One criticism of it that I do personally agree with is that I think it would have strengthened the story if there was even a little given toward why the lottery is held. That it's being held at all is, of course, the story's point, but it's a little hard to choose sides when you don't even know whether one or both or neither actually had some rationale behind it. The only other purpose I could see reminds me of an old Star Trek episode, but I won't name it lest it give away anything.
Of the other stories in the collection, "The Daemon Lover" was a rather good use of an unreliable narrator, leaving me wondering the whole time whether Something Strange was going on or if this lady had simply lost her mind as she prepares for her wedding. "The Witch" was a delightfully dark little thing about a man trying to entertain a little boy during a train ride. "Flower Garden" was a surprisingly blunt look at racism.
There was also a collection of unpublished and otherwise uncollected works. Most of them were pleasant enough, but the two that stood out to me were "The Summer People" and "The Rock," as there's definitely an unsettling current beneath both of them. Even more so for "A Visit," which feels very much like an early sketch for The Haunting of Hill House, from the overwhelmed protagonist, to the family dynamics, to many details of the setting itself. And getting away from horror again, "Louisa, Please Come Home" was an almost... deflating story, I'll call it. You've seen enough situations in fiction where someone has just every last bit of optimism go out of them, and this story captures it perfectly. It doesn't come to a strong conclusion either, but in the best way possible.
I should get to the point the title promised, huh?
I will say that I liked the movie The Haunting significantly more than the novel The Haunting of Hill House. I'm also happy that Shirley Jackson herself was delighted with how the movie turned out. To me, a lot of it comes down to what you can and can't get away with in a written medium. For centuries, that was all anyone had, except for plays. And for the few who could actually read, I guess. Hm, I've kind of painted myself into a corner.
An aspect of good horror is that it goes for all the senses. Much writing focuses on how things look or sound, but smells and tastes and touches that seem vile or just slightly off can add so much mood. A lot of that can be communicated in writing, but it has its limits. The basic plot is that a professor knows any sort of scientific proof of haunted houses has been utterly bungled in the past, so he wants to do it right, and he collects people with varying levels of connection to the occult to spend an extended period in a notoriously haunted house with him.
There were a number of changes made to the book when adapting it as a movie. For one, they changed Dr. Montague's character a lot, turning him from a short, round, bearded man somewhat put upon by his wife into a tall Adonis, even serving as a failed romantic interest for the protagonist (which, of course, also served to deflect the book's hints of same-sex romance between two of the female characters, as it would cause swooning from a 1960s audience). I could take that or leave that, I guess; I liked him as a more confident man in the movie, but it doesn't matter that much to the plot. But as to being put upon, that requires someone to do the putting upon. The novel has his wife as someone who's normally quite sweet, but when the subject matter turns to the occult, she's overbearing and sticks her nose in wherever. I much preferred her role in the movie, there to be a voice of reason but little else. Plus the movie deletes an assistant she brings along, who is little more than annoying. Probably more as a limitation of the number of filming locations they were willing to use, most of the scenes outside the house were also removed. And then there's the ending. I'm struggling with how to say this while avoiding spoilers, but it comes down to a big difference between choice and fate, and the book went with choice, which I think dampens the message somewhat while also not giving it enough context to have as big an impact.
To put it bluntly, I found the movie a lot scarier than the book, and it's precisely because of what the writing can't do. Now, I feel I do have to preface this with a quote from another of my favorite movies, a dumb comedy called Back to School:
The reason you want to read these works is so you can experience them for yourself, so you can share the thoughts and feelings of the writer, without the interference of your actor and director and professor's point of view getting in the way, to truly share and understand the common feelings of all mankind, the feelings of being alive.
So yeah, there's value in getting the unadulterated thoughts straight from the writer. But there are some things that are just never going to get away from being visual, or auditory, or tactile, or whatever. Depending on what they are, there may never be an adequate way of conveying them in words only.
So when a writer is trying to describe what a room looks like, you'll get the gist of it. You'll probably have a little different picture of it in your mind's eye than the author did. When that becomes problematic is when exactly how that thing looks is paramount. A movie can just show it to you. In the book, the strange noises are just repeatedly called a pounding, but that's pretty imprecise. What does it sound like? How loud is it? How rapid is it? Those things of course can be said as well, but then the problem becomes: the more words you throw at it, the more it slows down the narrative at a time things may be happening quickly and your heart should be racing. Same thing with how eerie it looks when something on the other side of the door is warping it. It's hard to describe exactly how that would look, how close the door seems to bursting open, unless you're willing to get very purple with it, and again, that can harm the pacing. The more unusual something looks or sounds, the harder it is to give the reader a frame of reference to compare.
And that's why I found the movie a lot more effective, some for personal preference about the changes made and some for it being a more visceral experience that way.
But there's one more short novel included in this book, the one I mentioned first: We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I loved this. And I don't think a movie would be as effective at communicating it. Why not? Because there are only one or two scenes that are really that sensory, and the specifics of it aren't that important. One thing a movie can't do, unless it's heavily narrated, is give you the nice stream of consciousness that a limited narrator can, and this novel uses that to wonderful effect. What's important is how the characters feel, how they act, and that's amply demonstrated in the writing. It doesn't matter what the house looks like, not the details of it anyway, and you get enough description to make a general setting, which is all that's needed. (Incidentally, I now notice this has also been made into a movie, and oddly enough, Rotten Tomatoes gives it a far higher rating than IMDB does.)
The thing that struck me most about this story is that all the characters are terrible people. Normally I hate reading a story where I don't like anyone, but there's a bit of a difference here. I did like the sisters who are the main characters, despite them being terrible people. It's no mean thing to make sympathetic characters out of terrible people. So much of this story is situational, not driven by the particulars of what things look or sound like, but by what they do. Main character Mary Katherine (it took me a while to realize Merricat was a nickname for her and not someone else) definitely comes across as someone with developmental problems but can get along perfectly fine in public when she has to, and her sister Constance is very patient with that. Even dependent on it.
The basic setup is that Constance was tried and acquitted of a very serious crime years ago, and the entire town continues to ostracize her, to the point she never leaves the house. There's an invalid uncle living with them as well, and only her younger sister ever goes into town to do the shopping, where people treat her with thinly veiled rancor. There's only one friend who comes to visit, and even her true feelings about it are questionable. Then another person shows up whom Constance warms up to quickly but Mary Katherine never likes, and it instigates several devastating events.
Kind of like "The Lottery," this one left me wanting to know the "why" of it, but it's less important, since "just because" is actually a completely viable answer.
I've got very mixed opinions of the short stories I've read, but I will definitely seek out more of Shirley Jackson's novels.
I've read The Lottery but I don't think I know of any of her other works? I might have to check them out! I certainly haven't read In Bloom in a while, honestly I don't think I remember what it was about but I always remember The Good You Might Do. I don't know how many genres you'd say you write in but your stories definitely hit like a truck when you want them too.
My favorite Shirley Jackson story:
Is called "One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts". I've been considering for five or six years doing a Ponyfied version of it, actually, but it seems unlikely that I ever will...
I'm also a great believer in the idea that certain stories want to exist in certain forms. I've been doing two webcomics for more than 10 years now, and one of them, called "Daily Grind," would work just as well, I think, as a novel or a cartoon series or something like that. In fact, I stopped doing it as a regular comic over two years ago now: instead of being two pages of comics five times a week, it's now a big page of text with a single illustration near the top three times a week.
But the other, "Terebinth," could never be anything other than a comic. Each page's layout is very important to how the story is told, and there's just no way to replicate that in any other medium as near as I can tell. Or my poem "The Wreck of the Vigilance" that I did for one of the Writeoffs and later sold to the Silver Blade website. It's essentially a short story, but I can't imagine it would work as well in straight prose...
Mike
this is an author whose work I clearly should bring to mind upon mention of her name. <.<
5673784
That story was also in the collection I read. I did find it cute, if not that notable.
5673758
I used to write too many genres. Now I don’t write much at all. :(
5673818
Not just bring to mind. I’d highly recommend reading that last one.
Shirley Jackson... a name I'm familiar with, yet whose work I am criminally not. I read "The Lottery" years ago, I think maybe in high school, and while I really did enjoy it, I note that my class was not particularly enthralled or surprised by it. Some degree of present jaded-ness must have seeped into us, by then. I also watched the Netflix adaptation of "The Haunting of Hill House," which at the time scared me, though now I'm not so sure it was as scary as I made it out to be.
Movies and visual media are great at conveying, I think, the immediate discomfort present in great horror. As horror, in my view, relies very much on the unsettling of convention, and given that much of our experience - that is, our human experience - is based, conventionally, on what is seen, anything that warps that, even non-horror, is our closest representation to reality beyond reality itself. So movies get to play around with that warping to the point of being effective at communicating, at times, the "something is wrong" scenario. They supply more readily the material that makes the horror - from the physical costumes of the classic Frankenstein film to the fantastic SFX we see today.
Ironically, it is this ability to supply which at times may inhibit the adaptation of horror. Lovecraft's stories come to mind as being inherently uninteresting to make into movies without, say, large leaps in adaptation strategy. Then again, the whole of cosmic horror is about the inability to conventionalize the subject itself - a thing, I think, that movies must inherently try to do, in order to present it. (This may be why some cosmic horror movies get a bad rep even if they're written well, because there's a reliance on them being "graspable," for lack of a better word.)
I should read more Shirley Jackson. These past two years, I've discovered an appreciation for horror of a less conventional, "spooky monster in the dark" nature, and she seems like she'd be up my alley.
5673878
Yes, I like that same kind of horror that plays with your imagination more than anything else. Ms. Jackson only occasionally wrote short stories that were horror, but her novels more consistently are. Still, they're generally not horror in the traditional sense of something like Dracula or the mummy. The Haunting of Hill House comes closest to that, from the things I've read. More of it is just not outright scary, but very fundamentally creepy. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is great at having a wrong atmosphere underpinning everything, even as there's nothing supernatural going on. Of the short stories, I think "A Visit" is the creepiest.
I adored The Haunting of Hill House, and have been wanting to see the movie for a while, so I'm mostly excited that you thought it was even better... except the lesbian subtext is toned down? Noooo!!! (Okay, not really surprising for 1960, as you said, but I did find it actually important to the plot.) And I have a copy of We Have Always Lived in the Castle waiting for me on my shelf... I have hundreds of other books vying for attention, but this puts some interesting potential context to take into it.
Maybe one book, a reading of "The Lottery" that lost impact because I had some awareness of the twist, and her reputation aren't enough to justify saying this, but I will: Shirley Jackson is really good. In addition to just being good writing, her genre and Twilight Zone vibes are something that suit her era yet don't feel common. I'd know what to look for next if I enjoyed an Isaac Asimov story from that era, but I'm not sure who fits with Jackson like that -- just looking for other haunted house stories wouldn't be it.
5674360
Oddly enough, I felt like the undercurrent of a budding relationship between Theo and Eleanor was much more overt in the book, what with Eleanor wanting to picnic with her and go live with her when the house event was over and Theo repeatedly referring to her as "my Eleanor," but if you read the Wikipedia summaries of each, including the notes on production and such, they claim the movie was more overt, even to the point the actress playing Theo was instructed to pull it back some by never making physical contact with Eleanor (she didn't obey). There were some scenes of Theo's back story that would have made it much more obvious, had they not been cut. So YMMV. Just make sure you watch the 1963 version and not the 1999 one. Another fun tidbit with that is it was on the slate to be colorized along with all the other movies Ted Turner got his hands on, but the original contract for The Haunting requires it to be in black & white, so the director was able to keep that from happening.
Since you're already familiar with The Haunting of Hill House, I'd recommend also reading her short story "A Visit." It was written first, but I think they're better read in opposite order because of what each tends to spoil about the other. She writes a very understated horror, which I appreciate, and she has a knack for making repetition effective. She does tend to do very open endings, which doesn't always sit well with me. A good example of that is her novel The Sundial, which I would still like to read, and which also shares a lot of common character types and imagery with The Haunting of Hill House.