“Dark Tales” by Shirley Jackson
I finished reading this book and I think that I was pleased with it, overall, despite this book being a pretty quick read. Some of the short stories were scary while others where just unusual or strange. I picked this book up because I read “The Haunting of Hill House” and “We’ve always lived in the castle” by the same author so I wanted to give this a try. Some of the short stories in this book do remind me a little of those books but not all. If you enjoy reading a bunch of short stories by an author that is a well known horror author, this might be a good book to try.
This book may be more for the adults or the more mature young adult/teenagers, at the very least. May be worth reading yourself before letting your kiddos reading it.
Synopsis: After the publication of her short story “The Lottery” in the New Yorker in 1948 received an unprecedented amount of attention, Shirley Jackson was quickly established as a master horror storyteller. This collection of classic and newly reprinted stories provides readers with more of her unsettling, dark tales, including “The Possibility of Evil” and “The Summer People.” In these deliciously dark stories, the daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, the loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and the concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. In the haunting world of Shirley Jackson, nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe, from the city streets to the crumbling country pile, and from the small-town apartment to the dark, dark woods. There’s something sinister in suburbia. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.