Who Goes There?

One of the most famous authors in 20th century American literature, Shirley Jackson occupies the same space as Ray Bradbury in the sense that she broke into the mainstream by sticking to slick outlets. In 1948 her short story “The Lottery” was published in The New Yorker and sparked an enormous amount of press and controversy, and “The Lottery” has since been canonized as one of those classic short stories high school English students are subjected to. But Jackson wrote much more than “The Lottery,” even if we’re counting just her short fiction; but she also was the rare successful horror novelist prior to 1970, with classics like The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Unfortunately she didn’t live to see the horror renaissance of the ’70s, as she died in 1965, at 48 years old, after years of what should’ve struck people at the time as concerning levels of drug and alcohol abuse. In a way she was a victim of her own success, since being a famous lady writer who made more money than her husband contributed to the strain in her marriage, which was a miserable ordeal.

It would be fair, I think, to call Jackson a horror writer first and foremost; certainly her horror writing is what made her legacy. She did sometimes not write horror, as is the case with today’s story, “The Omen,” one of Jackson’s few appearances in F&SF—indeed one of maybe a handful of appearances she made in the genre outlets. No doubt F&SF‘s dignified appearance, fast-and-loose philosophy with genre boundaries, plus (I suspect) some charm on Anthony Boucher’s part, had some role in wrangling a thoroughly slick author like Jackson. “The Omen” is pretty obscure, especially for Jackson, and admittedly it’s not a hidden masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination; but it does show another side to Jackson, albeit with some of the venom we come to expect with her.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Eighth Series (ed. Anthony Boucher) and the Jackson collection Just an Ordinary Day, a volume of stories which hitherto had either gone unpublished or uncollected in a previous Jackson collection. It’s possible there’s a reprint that ISFDB doesn’t register, since Jackson is sometimes considered a non-genre author, but I find it believable that “The Omen” has only been reprinted twice.

Enhancing Image

Granny is nice old woman in her eighties, who gets along with her daughter, son-in-law, and grandkids—and on the day of the story she also gets hit with an unexpected but very welcome bit of money. She gets an envelope, inside of which is a check for $13.74, “with a covering letter saying that the sender had owed it to Granny’s husband for nearly fifty years, and so was paying it now to his widow, with interest.” Now, in today’s economy $13.74 is piss, but circa 1957 it would’ve been a good deal of money, especially for an old lady. You could do quite a bit with $13.74. She makes a list of things to get her family members, including a perfume brand named Carnation and a stuffed blue cat—only problem being it takes her all of five minutes to lose the list. Anyway, Granny is not the main character, but a much younger woman named Edith, who is in a long-term relationship with some guy named Jerry but who is hesitant to marry him—not because of Jerry, but Edith’s abusive and domineering (redundant) mother.

The omen of the story’s title is Edith making a mistake and finding Granny’s shopping list instead of taking her own bag. Being destitute and a little supersticious, Edith takes the shopping list to be a sort of guide that’ll help her return home, and even maybe help her make up her mind on the Jerry situation. Let’s talk about genre, and about F&SF‘s policy in the ’50s, especially after J. Francis McComas stepped down. Usually fiction printed in F&SF would be SF, fantasy, or a hybrid, but on occasion Boucher would buy a story that can’t really be called SFF, yet is also maybe too strange to have seen print in the slick outlets. Jackson’s first original story in F&SF, “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts,” doesn’t have any discernable fantastic elements, and indeed ISFDB classifies it as non-genre; yet it might’ve been too hard to classify (it isn’t horror, and yet there’s something vaguely sinister in its twist) for higher paying markets. “The Omen” arguably is not fantasy at all, depending on how you interpret the list. Is this a case of something like magical realism, or is it a bunch of coincidences? Are the omens good or bad, and does it matter on a cosmic scale?

I personally am counting “The Omen” as fantasy because I have to I think Jackson’s implying that some cosmic force is pointing Edith in the right direction, even though she can’t be sure of it. She can’t know the context for the “Carnation” on the list, instead taking it to mean finding a literal carnation flower, and so she happens to meet a man on the street with one carnation on his breast who’s on his way to getting married. The soon-to-be-married man is also taking part in a contest involving a certain woman and $100 in groceries, which Edith gets wrapped up in. A comedy of mistaken identity ensues. I think the man with the carnation is a seed planeted in Edith’s mind that will later influence her to be more assertice in her relationship with Jerry, but I might be overthinking it. Jackson could at times be a writer of shocking subtlety, although I don’t think “The Omen” is an example of such; it seems to be Jackson taking herself and her world (New York) less seriously. Edith’s journey is a sort of spoof odyssey wherein Our Heroine™ is someone of modest means and probably average intelligence who maybe tricks herself into thinking she’s stumbled into a fantastical situation. Your mileage may vary.

Reading this, I couldn’t help but think about Jackson’s life, the circumstances of her writing, and a kind of unexpected but perfectly logical contemporary comparison: Flannery O’Connor. The two were in some ways very different: O’Connor was a diehard Catholic while I struggle to believe the woman who wrote We Have Always Lived in the Castle believed in an all-loving deity. But they were also pessimists with a biting sense of humor and an equally biting sense of justice, and even though Jackson often wrote horror at a time when the genre was pulp-adjacent, I do think she was at least almost as morally serious as O’Connor. (Sadly they also both died young.) This is why I’m not sure what to make of “The Omen,” which depicts a downtrodden woman who is, quite possibly, on the cusp of liberating herself from one abuser to falling into the hands of another. The few times we hear from Jerry are not flattering. It could also be that I’m projecting Jackson’s own deeply unhappy marriage onto a character of hers, but I can’t help but get the impression that Edith, while on the surface being presented with a way out with Jerry, may be stuck between a rock and a hard place.

There Be Spoilers Here

Edith soon finds a cafe, Kitty’s Lunch, where the owner herself had, “with odd humor, chosen to adorn the window of Kitty’s Lunch with a large painted blue cat.” The cafe also happens to have a payphone Edith can use, and she just happens to have enough money for a cup of coffee and a phone call. And don’t feel too bad for Granny, who you may recall lost her list and subsequently forgot everything she was supposed to get. But everything works out. I could be wrong, though, but the ending feels phony to me, which I know is an odd way of putting it. I don’t think Jackson believes in her own happy ending. Granny, at the very end, even calls the outcome of events “sentimental,” which is a word that I can’t imagine Jackson would use without puking in her own mouth a tiny bit; Jackson doesn’t do sentimentality. Is this impression of fakeness intentional or just a failure at being sincere? It’s a question Jackson’s not keen on answering.

A Step Farther Out

“The Omen” is a lesser known Jackson story, because of its relatively lighthearted tone but also I don’t think it shows Jackson at her best. We know Shirley Jackson could be a really vicious and subversive writer for her time, but “The Omen” reads as the eternal pessimist indulging in sentimentality. You could even argue it’s non-genre and that not only should it have not been printed in F&SF but that I shouldn’t have covered it for this genre blog of mine, but I’ll be generous and work off the assumption that the hints of supernatural intervention should be taken at face value. It’s a curiosity that shows Jackson’s range, but it’s not something I’d recommend unless you’re a Jackson completionist.

See you next time.