If life were fair, Shirley Jackson would have lived to a ripe old age and given us a dozen more books. Because life isn’t completely unfair, her influence lives on in the works of writers such as Neil Gaiman and Suzanne Collins. Jackson was born 100 years ago on December 14, 1916 and died unexpectedly of heart failure in 1965, at the age of 48. In that span of time, she managed to create a substantial collection of groundbreaking literature while simultaneously raising four children. All without a wife to help her.
Her experience of family life led to two memoirs of the snort-your-coffee variety. “Life Among the Savages” and “Raising Demons” are the forerunners of Erma Bombeck’s books, only with more edge. They need to be read as products of their time, as all of the adults smoke and nobody wears a seat belt. But many of the issues she coped with will still resound with parents today: playing musical beds when the whole family is sick, sports equipment everywhere, dealing with the IRS.
While these two books show one side of Shirley Jackson, most of her writing belongs in a different category altogether. Her best-known story, “The Lottery” — a tale in which a group of villagers moves from domestic banter to mob brutality in half a morning’s time — was originally 
published in The New Yorker in 1948. It generated more letters to the magazine than any other fiction story before or since.
Jackson was a master at creating an atmosphere of foreboding, painting the details of everyday life as a thin veneer over things more sinister. Sometimes the malevolent force is supernatural, as in her prototypical horror novel, “The Haunting of Hill House.” In other books, humanity is the menace.
“We Have Always Lived in the Castle” was Jackson’s final published novel. The narrator, 18-year-old Mary Katherine, leads a reclusive life with her older sister Constance, whom she adores, and their disabled Uncle Julian, who adamantly reminds everyone that Constance was acquitted of the murders of the rest of the family six years earlier.
A few themes crop up again and again in Jackson’s work. She examined the darkness in all of us, the fact that normal is a subjective term and the 
extremes people will accept in order not to make waves or be considered an outsider.
With the 100th anniversary of her birth creating an upsurge of attention in Jackson’s life and writing, Ruth Franklin stepped in to fill the need with a new biography. The title seems appropriate: “Shirley Jackson, a Rather Haunted Life.”
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