Dark Tales, Shirley Jackson

Received to review via Netgalley; publication date 6th October 2016

Dark Tales is an interesting little collection of uncanny stories — not stories which are openly horror, but ones with that creeping sense of unease, or that little twist. Like the man who finds someone stalking him all the way home, does his best to avoid him, and when he eventually gets home… his wife calls someone up to tell them she’s got him. Twists like that, and moments where it feels like the story took a left turn from expected normality all of a sudden.

Shirley Jackson was a fine writer, and these stories are really well done in terms of structure and content: there’s just enough in each one, but not so much that it makes things too obvious or belabours a point.

My only issue reading these was that the Kindle version received as an ARC wasn’t properly structured, so you couldn’t jump to a particular story, and the stories weren’t actually separated from each other. I’m sure that’s not the case in the printed work, but you might want to preview an ebook to make sure they did fix that.

Rating: 4/5