"The Summer People" (1950)

This Shirley Jackson story is devastating in a very sneaky way, which is typical of her clinical style, half New Yorker breeze and half ancient eerie portents warning you not to do things, like go into that house. Or, in this case specifically, not to stay at your summer place after Labor Day. The Allisons—Mr. is 60, Mrs. 58—have always talked about staying but have always returned to New York on time, white shoes put away. Then they usually spend much of September and October regretting it. We never do find out things like the source of their income. They are obviously wealthy on one level, but not so much that they feel they are. They put up with things at their summer place like no electricity or plumbing in order to enjoy the soft, rustic summer views of a lake. The inconveniences make the Allisons seem more hardy and adventurous. This year, they finally decide at the last minute to stay. Jackson then wields an artful sledgehammer to knock the foreshadowing into place. Not a single local they mention it to likes the decision one bit. They could simply be resistant to change, as the Allisons take it. But the news travels like fire among them and their resistance feels sinister. And indeed, by the time of the story's insanely undetailed end, sinister is practically all that's left. Certainly it has exact parallels with Jackson's more famous story, "The Lottery," the two stories written within months of one another. The style is pure midcentury New Yorker, with a chirpy third-person voice relating compressed description and dialogue. It bears a vertiginous sense of pitching forward momentum that is unnerving, hard to put a finger on. We don't know where we're going, ever, but we feel the motion almost right away. The reveals, such as they are, come swiftly and they are powerful, almost physically affecting. In the space of a day or two the Allisons go from looking forward to an extra few weeks at the lake, to encountering trouble getting their usual services, to—apparently—sitting quietly as the sun sets waiting for their deaths. Their kerosene has been cut off. Their car has been tampered with and won't start. Their phone is dead. A letter from their son doesn't sound right—a very effective detail that throws the scope of this into much broader perspective. I haven't really been able to let go of this story since I first read it several years ago.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
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