Unsettling, macabre and twisted tales. I loved them!!!

I really enjoyed this. Shirley Jackson is one of my favourite authors, so even though I'm not usually a short story person, I really savoured these. She's subtle and sly and deliciously dark, and I've not yet read her equal. I particularly liked the story of the man being chased all over New York on his way home from work by an ominous stranger. So quiet and calm but terrifying.

Dark Tales is an anthology of Shirley Jackson’s stories made up of previous collections Come Along With Me, Just An Ordinary Day and Let Me Tell You - there’s no new material here. And, let me tell you, it’s also by far the weakest fiction of Jackson’s I’ve read!

I’m a big Shirley Jackson fan. I love The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Lottery and Other Stories, and have re-read each book at least twice, but the stories in Dark Tales are all pretty bad.

Jackson’s style is very lo-fi for the most part, slowly introducing eerie, creepy elements and finishing strongly with a powerful scene. Her most famous story, The Lottery, is the perfect example of that though numerous stories, mostly collected in The Lottery and Other Stories, have knockout twist endings and an unsettling tone of dread throughout that builds to a horrific climax.

The stories in Dark Tales start off similarly, focusing on the mundane everyday - and go nowhere. They just end as boringly as they began. Like in The Possibility of Evil, the character potters about her home and town, doing grocery shopping or cooking or writing letters, someone will do or seem a bit off, and then the story’s over. Louisa, Please Come Home sees a teenager run away from home and be forgotten by her family. Zzz…

The more overtly supernatural stories are only slightly less dull and seem like corny Twilight Zone knockoffs. Like in The Bus where a stranded woman gets a lift to a familiar house that turns out to be her childhood home and she can’t escape it. The story Home features a pair of ghosts who like to sit in cars. Really??

Like in a lot of Jackson’s stories, the menace of small town America her paranoia made her feel is prevalent like in The Summer People but it’s so much better realised in stories like The Lottery or her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

I suppose Dark Tales has well-written stories but Shirley Jackson is usually also able to grip and entertain the reader with the content as much as the style, and she fails consistently to do so throughout this collection. Evidently her best material is in her most well-known collection, The Lottery and Other Stories, which I’d recommend over this one. Dark Tales is full of nothing but bottom of the barrel scrapings - even if you’re a Jackson fan, this one’s not worth bothering with.

Some of these stories I liked very much, others not at all. The quality of writing is undoubtedly high, but sometimes the narrative mechanism is too transparent, a couple of stories that stand on a certain dreamlike quality, lack of naturalness,and the novella set in the house on the lake, which is in some way associated with Northanger Abbey with a curious mirroring mechanism (Northanger Abbey is a satire of the gothic novel in which all the dark details reveal themself harmless, while in this gothic tale the house and its inhabitants, apparently bright, turn out very dark), is definitely cumbersome.
The very poor quality of the ebook in my possession , in which the stories begin one after another, not even separated by a line or title, did not help the reading.
Thank Penguin Books (UK) and Netgalley for giving me a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

A book that reads surprisingly dated in 2017, even if its contents are from the 1940s and '50s. What's worse, a book that doesn't convince as being a suitable 'best of', for that is what this selection is. Perhaps the fact that Jackson published six novels, but only one collection of short stories, in her life shows that this book's efforts are somewhat in vain. Pieces like 'Paranoia' are OK as far as they go, with their antiquated manner and obvious genre thrills, but that peters out, and the tale that follows it here just has a nonsense stop, and certainly not the obvious ending. There's one of those 'picture of an old house that is somehow alive' works – and a clumsy one, too, as is the 'ooh, how daring – a female killer' piece. Before that we've had 'The Possibility of Evil' – allegedly up there with her best, but far too meh to my mind. No, if this is a collated selection, it may well be my first and last Shirley Jackson. The style is too stilted, the looks at the sins behind the mundanest curtains too passe, and the story construction too poor, for me to continue with her.