What REALLY Makes A Story Terrifying?

Today, I’m going to do something a little different. I’m not going to analyze a book, but rather an author, one of the greatest horror writers of our time.

Is it Clive Barker?

Stephen King?

Wes Craven?

Nope.

It’s someone you might have heard of, but more likely you skipped over her. It’s Shirley Jackson.

Were you surprised with my choice?

Most people are because they don’t consider Shirley Jackson a horror writer.

Shirley Jackson doesn’t write about monsters or demons. She doesn’t write gore or jumps scares. She doesn’t write complicated plots with 50 million clues.

No.

What she does write about is much more sinister. She writes the slow, simmering suspense of human relationships.

She writes so-called ‘normal’ characters before showing us how deeply damaged they are. She writes about the uncanniness of the ordinary, the creepiness in everyday life.

In The Lottery, we see a town that starts out normal enough only to realize that is isn’t normal at all. The chilling part is how everyone in town thinks it’s normal.

The Road Through The Wall is a chilling look of suburbia and the walls we build not only around our communities but our hearts.

The Haunting Of Hill House, her only ghost story, is credited with single-handedly reviving the ghost story genre. However that story wasn’t about ghosts, it was about perceived reality. Even the end was ambiguous enough to possibly not be a ghost story at all.

We have always lived in the Castle is about secrets worth taking to the grave, and the consequences of those secrets.

No one in Jackson’s world escapes unscathed. Though her characters are not overly emotional people, they are ruled by their feelings which influence their actions and everything they think. Though her style has always been to terrorize, instead of horrify.

Terror is defined as a feeling of dread and anticipation that comes before the horror. However, unlike most modern horror, Shirley Jackson was able to make that terror simmer throughout her entire stories until the very end.

This is what makes Shirley Jackson the undisputed Master of Horror. Give her a read sometime.