ABOUT TWO NICE PEOPLE

Two even-tempered people get abnormally angry with one another, marry, and have four children.

AFTER YOU, MY DEAR ALFONSE

Underneath a mother’s kind gestures to her son’s friend, lurk some very stereotypical prejudices.

AFTERNOON IN LINEN

A ten-year-old girl lies to minimize her talents because she fears getting teased by other children.

ALL SHE SAID WAS YES

Having predicted her parents’ death, a daughter does not shed a tear when they finally die.

ALONE IN A DEN OF CUBS

The Narrator becomes Den Mother of the group of Cub Scouts her son belongs to.

ARCH-CRIMINAL

A mother learns that her twelve-year old son is a borderline criminal.

THE BEAUTIFUL STRANGER

A wife becomes convinced that a stranger has replaced her husband.

BEFORE AUTUMN

A wife arranges the murder-for-hire of her husband with their fifteen-year-old neighbor.

BIOGRAPHY OF A STORY

Shirley Jackson never wrote a story that got as much negative attention as "The Lottery."

THE BIRD’S NEST

A divided young woman finds a cohesive new self when she moves on from the past and her four personalities melt into one.

THE BUS

An old lady falls asleep on the bus and gets thrown off at the wrong stop.

A CAULIFLOWER IN HER HAIR

A family seems perfect until the father starts flirting with his daughter’s friend.

CHARLES

A young boy’s adventures in kindergarten produce a lot of conversation with his parents about a particularly mischievous classmate.

COLLOQUY

A woman visits a doctor under the pretense that her husband’s mental health is worrying her but we find out that she is suffering from instability.

COME ALONG WITH ME

A clairvoyant widow moves to the city to change her name and rent a perfectly square room from a strange woman.

COME ALONG WITH ME IN IRELAND

A female trio invites a drunken Irish man into the apartment where they are gossiping to give him a hot meal. He quotes Yeats and insults the women before he leaves.

COME TO THE FAIR

A lonely woman makes friends and gets the man of her dreams telling fortunes at the town fair.

THE DAEMON LOVER

A 34-year-old woman desperately searches for her fiancée on her wedding day only to find he has disappeared into thin air.

A DAY IN THE JUNGLE

A wife leaves her husband and is on the verge of insanity until they reunite.

DECK THE HALLS

A young couple experiences the giving spirit of Christmas when two needy children knock on their door.

DEVIL OF A TALE

The devil has a son who bribes his father for infinite favors.

DINNER FOR A GENTLEMAN

Dimity Baxter meets her fairy godmother in the kitchen, and throws a lemon pie in the face of her male chauvinist dinner guest.

DOROTHY AND MY GRANDMOTHER AND THE SAILORS

A young girl recalls the last time she and her friend visited the fleet in San Francisco, and her fear of sailors.

THE DUMMY

Two women go to dinner together at a restaurant that has stage entertainment. One of the women slaps the dummy of a drunk ventriloquist who is humiliating his wife in public.

ELIZABETH

A woman’s quest to preserve her position at work while in a personal relationship with her business partner, drives her to manipulate their work environment.

EXPERIENCE AND FICTION

Shirley Jackson discusses the relationship between experience and fiction to explain where she gets unique ideas for stories.

FAME

A newspaper columnist writing notes on local women is more interested in where Shirley Jackson lives than in the novel Jackson has just written.

FAMILY MAGICIAN

A family’s problems are solved when their fairy godmother appears.

A FINE OLD FIRM

A woman introduces herself to neighbors who just happen to be family of her son’s friend in the army.

FLOWER GARDEN

Everyone loves the mother and son who just moved to town until the mother hires a black man to work in her garden.

THE FRIENDS

A woman walks in on her friend’s act of infidelity and blackmails her for favors.

GNARLY THE KING OF THE JUNGLE

A spoiled young girl gets the family servant in trouble.

THE GOOD WIFE

A jealous husband locks his wife in her bedroom until she will confess to an affair she denies.

GOT A LETTTER FROM JIMMY

A wife wants to kill her husband because he won’t open a letter.

A GREAT VOICE STILLED

The literary world gathers at the hospital where a writer is on his deathbed.

HANGSAMAN

A young woman leaves home for her first year of college, but does not really feel independent and powerful until after a bout in a middle-of-nowhere forest and a suicide stunt on a bridge.

THE HAUNTING

Staying at a haunted mansion to assist a doctor in researching psychic phenomenon results in tragedy for one young guest.

HOME

A city girl moves to the country and is almost killed by two ghosts.

HONEYMOON OF MRS. SMITH

A middle-aged woman marries a man rumored to have killed his six former wives.

I DON’T KISS STRANGERS

A girl will not kiss the guy she loves good bye when he is drafted to war.

KNOW WHO I LOVE

A young woman with a sad childhood remembers her one true love when her mother dies.

INDIANS LIVE IN TENTS

Allan Burlingame proposes marriage for shelter when the original tenant of the apartment he sublets says she must return.

THE INTOXICATED

An intoxicated man leaves a party and seeks solitude in the kitchen where he gets more sobriety than he expected.

IOU

A retired schoolteacher unites a small town when her I.O.U. agreement with a young boy spirals into a local I.O.U. trade fest.

ISLAND

An invalid woman escapes from the placid routine of old age to the fantasy island of her imagination.

JACK THE RIPPER

A man takes a drunken girl back to her apartment and kills her.

JANICE

A college girl brags to friends about attempting suicide after her mother said they could not afford to send her back to school.

JOURNEY WITH A LADY

A young boy traveling alone meets a lady thief on a train and helps her evade the police.

LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES

A nostalgic and witty mother shares eccentric stories about her children and remembers a big house of family memories.

LIKE MOTHER USED TO MAKE

A meticulous young man invites his polar opposite neighbor to dinner at his apartment. They are visited by an unexpected guest whose presence inspires an unusual charade.

THE LITTLE HOUSE

A city woman inherits a little house in the village when her aunt dies.

LITTLE OLD LADY IN GREAT NEED

A great-grandmother teaches her great-granddaughter how to be a lady in public.

LORD OF THE CASTLE

A boy seeks revenge for his father’s murder, and is hanged on the same scaffold.

THE LOTTERY

A whole town gathers in the town square for the ominous tradition of their annual lottery.

LOUISA, PLEASE COME HOME

A young woman runs away from home and returns three years later to a family who does not recognize her.

LOVERS MEETINGS

A lonely woman meets her stalking in her apartment.

MAYBE IT WAS THE CAR

A tired housewife runs away in the family car.

MEN WITH THEIR BIG SHOES

A young wife and soon-to-be mother never guessed that hiring a maid would be the worst mistake of her life.

THE MISSING GIRL

A town gives up searching for a missing girl when they have no significant leads.

THE MOST WONDERFUL THING

A woman recovering from a miscarriage befriends another woman who does not want her newborn baby.

THE MOUSE

A husband realizes how terrible his wife is when she kills a pregnant mouse.

MRS. ANDERSON

A wife kills her husband when he stops saying the things he always has.

MRS. MELVILLE MAKES A PURCHASE

A spoiled middle-aged woman has a disappointing shopping experience.

MY GRANDMOTHER AND THE WORLD OF CATS

The NARRATOR’S grandmother finally finds a cat she gets along with.

MY LIFE WITH R.H. MACY

A young woman, who has become a new employee of Macy’s department store, discovers she is just a number in a bureaucratic and impersonal work environment.

MY RECOLLECTIONS OF S.B. FAIRCHILD

Buying a tape-recorder becomes the most troublesome purchase the Narrator has ever made.

MY UNCLE IN THE GARDEN

The Narrator convinces her surrogate uncle to trade fruitcake with the devil.

NIGHT WE ALL HAD GRIPPE

An entire family comes down with the flu and, after a hectic night of switching beds, no one knows what happened to the baby’s blanket.

NIGHTMARE

Miss Toni Morgan breaks habit to deliver a package for her employer, and becomes the main player in a New York City contest.

NOTES FOR A YOUNG WRITER

Shirley Jackson shares notes on the writing of short stories that she originally wrote for her aspiring writer daughter.

OF COURSE

The new neighbors on the block look normal, but are actually very strange.

THE OMEN

A grandmother’s shopping list becomes a stranger’s omen for love.

ON THE HOUSE

A liquor store owner gets ripped off by the wife of a blind man.

ONE ORDINARY DAY, WITH PEANUTS

A man spends his entire day performing simple acts of kindness for strangers on the street.

THE ORDER OF CHARLOTTE’S GOING

The Narrator scares her dying cousin to death.

PAJAMA PARTY

The Narrator hosts a pajama party for her oldest daughter’s eleventh birthday.

PARTY OF BOYS

A mother feels appreciated by her twelve-year old son when he thanks her for a great birthday party.

PILLAR OF SALT

A couple takes the train to New York for a two-week vacation that drives the wife crazy…literally.

PORTRAIT

The NARRATOR used to listen to a girl talk and smile, but never heard her laugh.

THE POSSIBILITY OF EVIL

A soft-faced old woman becomes obsessed with evil until she gets a dose of her own medicine.

RAISING DAEMONS

The Narrator reminisces about her life as a mother of four in a big white house in rural Vermont.

THE RENEGADE

A country woman, whose dog has been caught killing chickens, gets varying, and sometimes unsolicited, advice from the locals on how to break the dog of his murderous habit.

THE ROAD THROUGH THE WALL

When the wall that separates one suburban neighborhood from the outside world is torn down for the construction of a new road, horror floods in.

THE ROCK

The Angel of Death comes to Rock Island to take a woman away from her ill brother and his competitive wife.

SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY

A well-read boy recommends a list of books for a man who would like to start reading again. When the boy leaves the bookstore, the man also buys the boy’s favorite book…one the boy could not afford himself.

THE SISTER

Margaret leaves home against the advice of her parents to marry a man in Chicago.

THE SMOKING ROOM

A college girl tricks a smoking and illiterate devil into selling her his soul.

THE STORY WE USED TO TELL

Two old school roommates are sucked into a picture frame.

SUMMER AFTERNOON

Two young girls bored by dolls visit a mutual friend their mothers say is dead.

THE SUMMER PEOPLE

A city couple uncharacteristically decides to stay on at their country cottage after Labor Day.

THE SUNDIAL

A family prepares for the end of the world from a mansion on a hill in a small New England town.

THE TOOTH

A woman gets a tooth pulled and runs away with a strange man.

TOOTIE IN PEONAGE

A young and irresponsible babysitter gets pregnant by her sixteen-year-old boyfriend.

TRIAL BY COMBAT

A young woman who suspects someone has been taking things from her apartment circuitously confronts her neighbor.

A VERY HOT SUN IN BERMUDA

A college senior waits for the finishing touches on a final project that her art professor is doing her.

THE VERY STRANGE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

A town ousts a young couple and their magic maid.

THE VILLAGER

A woman in New York answers an ad in the Villager advertising furniture for sale. She finds herself assuming the identity of the absent seller to another prospective buyer.

A VISIT

A girl goes home with a friend from school for the summer, and seems to get lost in the infinite timelessness of her setting.

WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE

Two shunned sisters find happiness in the dark confines of their kitchen after the family estate catches fire.

WHAT A THOUGHT

A wife smashes an ashtray over her husband’s head.

WHEN BARRY WAS SEVEN

WHEN THINGS GET DARK

A distressed young woman seeks the advice of an old pen pal when she discovers she is pregnant early on in her new marriage.

WHISTLER’S GRANDMOTHER

A sweet-faced old lady’s scornful attitude towards her grandson’s wife stuns passengers on a New York train.

THE WISHING DIME

An unemployed man finds a dime and gives it to two young girls for good luck.

THE WITCH

A stranger who visits a little boy, traveling by train with his mother and his baby sister, manages to delight the boy and scare the mother with his teasing.

THE WITCHRAFT OF SALEM VILLAGE

Extreme fear and guilt lead to contagious hysteria, along with the imprisonment and execution of innocent people in Salem Village, Massachusetts.