issue 31 // vol 44

Horror next door

> ‘Dark Tales’ book review

Ethan Gibson Columnist

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hirley Jackson (1916-1965) is best

known for her novel The Haunting of Hill House and her infamous short story “The Lottery.” Both are classics of literary horror and demonstrate Jackson’s talent for creating unsettling stories of brilliant terror and mystery. Dark Tales, a new collection of her stories from Penguin Classics, presents a thrilling assortment of short stories about the darkness lurking within average American neighborhoods, forests, and country manors. Each story in Dark Tales imagines—without melodrama or hyperbole—the truly scary potential for everyday life to quickly become unrecognizable and hostile, without explanation.

Certain stories in the collection explore the fragility of identity—that aspect of ourselves so vitally intimate that its disruption is always uniquely unsettling. Both “Louisa, Please Come Home’ and “The Beautiful Stranger” conjure chilling stories about identity. In dramatizing drastic identity changes, Jackson taps into a deep well of haunting scenarios. As the familiar becomes alien and the known becomes unknowable, ordinary lives in Jackson’s stories are shattered, transfigured, or gradually dissolve until nothing is as it once seemed.

When the supernatural appears in these stories, it does so in ways that are subtle yet uncompromising. In “The Man in the Woods,” a young man strolling through an innocuous wood finds himself standing before a stone house. His trepidation is softened when the women inside graciously invite him into their warm kitchen. Soon another man appears, one who seems strange but not obviously dangerous. Indeed, there is no explicit danger anywhere in the story, only the suggestion of peril. The story’s sense of unease waxes and wanes as the young man rationally appraises his situation—until the abrupt end compels the reader to go back, to search frantically for clues, and to find, disappointed, that no answer to this story exists. All one finds is the same irresistible mystery present in each eerie detail of a story that, like many others in this collection, persists in the mind long after being read.

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Some of the most haunting stories in Dark Tales are those devoid of overt supernatural elements. Instead, nightmare-logic and unreliable perception often propel the descent of an initially tame story into a tapestry of despair, madness, isolation, and persecution—all without hope of explanation. “The Bus” provokes real sympathy for its protagonist in its first pages: An elderly woman gets off her bus at the wrong stop and finds herself stranded in unfamiliar territory during a storm. As headlights approach the vulnerable old woman, the reader feels profound apprehension but cannot anticipate where the tale will lead. Much of Jackson’s writing is similarly propelled by gripping mysteries, making her fiction incredibly readable.

It isn’t simply fear of the unknown that characterizes Jackson’s stories. Her gift for horror is most apparent when the unknown is thought to have been escaped, only for the familiar to prove the real source of terror.

The gradually overwhelming moods

of dread, unease, and uncanniness found in Jackson’s stories—the “quiet, cumulative shudders” Dorothy Parker celebrated in Jackson’s work—invoke fear in the reader, but also the unique feelings of satisfaction and admiration only inspired by great horror fiction. It’s hard to read Jackson’s work and still doubt the merit of horror writing.

Dark Tales is a delightful collection for fans of Jackson, and an excellent introduction to her talents for newcomers. Most importantly, this newly-published collection reasserts the relevancy and immortal power of Jackson’s fiction.

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Photo of the Beach Boys via Capitol Photo Archives

A note on history: Riding those (sound) waves

> Surf music’s brief crest of popularity

Caroline Ho Arts Editor

Wie temperatures as scorching as

they've been recently, few things sound more refreshing than hanging out at the beach all day. Whether or not you can actually make it out to your local sandy shore, we can at least evoke the sensation of waves and cool ocean air with some good old surf music.

Unsurprisingly, the musical genre’s history is tied to the sport of surfing itself. Though it had been practiced for millennia by ancient Polynesians, the sport started to gain a wider international following in the 2oth century. As surfboard manufacturing improved after World War II and a few major Hollywood films brought even more attention to the sport, by the early 60s surfing had become a popular activity with its own culture. The major surfing hotspot in North America outside Hawaii was Southern California, where surf music became the soundtrack for the subculture and beyond.

Music critics divide the genre into two categories, instrumental and vocal. The former was pioneered by Dick Dale, known as “The King of the Surf Guitar,” who was an avid surfer himself. Drawing influences from instrumental rock, country music, and his family’s Middle Eastern roots, Dale and his band The Del-Tones played at a rapid, staccato pace, with heavy use of electric guitars and reverb effects. Dale’s 1961 “Let’s Go Trippin” is regarded as the first surf music song, and his guitar arrangement of the traditional Eastern Mediterranean tune “Misirlou” (1962) launched the genre to national prominence.

Dale and The Del-Tones’ success paved the way for other instrumental surf groups such as The Bel Airs, The Surfaris, and the Chantays. These California-based bands solidified the characteristics of plucky guitars against swift, uncomplicated meters as hallmarks of instrumental surf.

While the instrumental style of surf music captured the experience of riding the waves, the genre’s vocal

branch expressed the beachgoing spirit directly through words. Most influential to vocal surf and by far most memorable today are the Beach Boys, founded in Los Angeles County in 1961. They combined some elements of instrumental surf with layered vocal harmonies, feel-good vibes, and lyrics concerning surfing, beaches, cars, and girls—a full idyllic California lifestyle. Titles such as “Surfin’ USA” (1963) and “California Girls” (1965), sporting lines like “You'd see them wearing their baggies/Huarachi sandals too/A bushy bushy blonde hairdo/Surfin’ USA,” left no question about the group’s interests and creative inspirations.

Vocal surf wasn’t just about surfing: It was about a whole cultural worldview emphasizing aesthetics, leisure, and youthful optimism, promoted by the Beach Boys, rock duo Jan and Dean, and other groups in California and beyond. Some musicians and listeners disdained the association between this vocal style and surf music, arguing that the only true surf music was instrumental, not this blatant, polished pop variant. However, half a century later the Beach Boys remain directly tied to surf music in popular perception today.

The widespread popularity of the genre—with slews of high-charting singles and albums from the Beach Boys and others—was short-lived. As with many things in music history, the arrival of Beatlemania and the British Invasion to the US in the mid-’6os pushed surf out of the musical spotlight. In addition, the growing political turmoil of the decade, with the escalation of the Vietnam War and other international tensions, created an atmosphere where the picturesque mood of surf music lost its appeal in favour of more subversive genres. By the late 60s, musical tastes had grown out of their blissful, beach-loving phase.

Nevertheless, surf music is still alive. Artists have been writing music influenced by the mellow buoyancy of the genre for decades. Beyond that, ‘60s surf music remains instantly recognizable and reminiscent of that ubiquitous, beachside, wave-riding atmosphere.

Cover of ‘Dark Tales’