Jackson, Shirley(1919–1965)
Although Shirley Jackson is considered a main-
stream rather than genre writer, many of her nov-
els and short stories contain at least some element
of the fantastic, and certainly these are the ones
for which she is best remembered. Her single most
compelling story is “The Lottery” (1948), a non-
fantastic horror tale in which a small town con-
ducts an annual lottery to determine which of the
local residents will be stoned to death, an offering
to propitiate some unnamed god and ensure a
good harvest for the local farmers. Although Jack-
son makes no attempt to imply that the ritual ac-
tually works or that there are any supernatural
entities involved, the story has become one of the
classics both in the horror genre and in main-
stream literature. It was quite controversial when
first published and was later produced as a made-
for-television movie.
Her first collection, The Lottery(1949), also
contains several loosely related stories about a
cryptic man, if he is a man, who she calls the
“demon lover.” The best of these is “The Daemon
Lover” (1949), in which a woman searches for her
missing fiancé and receives contradictory and per-
haps intentionally false information from various
people, leaving the impression that she has either
imagined his existence or is the target of a possibly
supernatural conspiracy. Although the fantastic el-
ements are often ambiguous in her stories, they are
occasionally overt, such as in “The Lovely Night,”
in which a woman is literally absorbed into a
tapestry.

Her most famous novel is THE HAUNTING OF

HILL HOUSE(1959), still the best haunted house

novel of all time. The Sundial(1958) is more ambi-

tious, almost dreamlike. A handful of people inter-

act in complex ways as they sit in a house awaiting

the apparent end of the world. Jackson’s short sto-

ries, not all of which are fantastic, have been col-

lected in The Magic of Shirley Jackson(1966), Come

along with Me(1968), The Lottery and Other Stories

(1991), and Just an Ordinary Day(1997). Her

prominence in the field is disproportionate to the

small body of actual fantastic fiction she wrote and

a testimony to its enduring quality.

Jacques, Brian (1939– )

Brian Jacques is a British fantasy writer whose

work has been entirely for young readers, although

he has attracted a substantial adult audience as

well. The vast majority of his books are set in the

Redwall series, an alternate version of our world

where there are no human beings and where vari-

ous talking animals are intelligent and have civi-

lizations equivalent to ours. In one sense they are

modern Aesop’s fables, for Jacques uses this device

to tell stories whose characters are indistinguish-

able from humans. They are very much in the tra-

dition of THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS(1908) by

Kenneth Grahame.

The Redwall series was not published in strict

chronological order, and the individual volumes

can generally be read at random, as each is a com-

plete story in itself. The main series, with associ-

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