Word: hangsaman
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...Wright; on grounds of incompatibility; after eleven years of marriage, one child; in Juarez, Mexico. Died. Shirley Jackson, 45, master of seance fiction, author of The Lottery, chilling tale of a 20th century New England village's annual rite of human sacrifice, and dozens more stories and novels (Hangsaman, We Have Always Lived in the Castle) so horrific that it always surprised readers to learn that all this came from a contented wife and good-humored mother of four who could with equal facility poke gentle fun at her home life in two rollick ing Jean Kerr-like novels...
...confusions of the four small children (Life Among the Savages, Raising Demons) in her Vermont household. But when shadows fall and the little ones are safely tucked in, Author Jackson pulls down the deadly nightshade and is off. With exquisite subtlety she then explores a dark world (The Lottery, Hangsaman, The Haunting of Hill House} in which the usual brooding old houses, fetishes, poisons, poltergeists and psychotic females take on new dimensions of chill and dementia under her black-magical writing skill and infra-red feminine sensibility...
...normal-looking girl who lives in a private nightmare of someone else's making. This heroine is usually close enough to sanity to be alarmed by her own fantasies, near enough to a strait-jacket to invite immediate psychoanalysis. The familiar formula, which worked almost magically well in Hangsaman (TIME, April 23, 1951). but began to look a bit seedy in The Bird's Nest (TIME, June 21, 1954), still carries a lot of the Jackson punch...
...racing axiom has it that a thoroughbred always returns to its best form. In The Lottery and Hangsaman, Shirley Jackson gave signs of being a writing thoroughbred, but The Bird's Nest marks only scattered returns to her best form...
...Hangsaman, by Shirley Jackson. An eerie story of a young girl's descent into schizophrenia (TIME, April...