The Summer People by Shirley Jackson, 1950
The magic trick:
A married couple that you sympathize with even while also kind of enjoying seeing them get their comeuppance
Yesterday, we highlighted “Wood Sorrel House” by Zach Williams, where strange things befell a family in the woods.
Well, we’re back in the realm of strange stuff in the country today. We’re going back 76 years to a suspense classic from Shirley Jackson. “The Summer People” is built around a husband and wife in their 50s. They live in New York most of the year; they summer in the country.
They’re perfectly suited for the story. They’re not villains. We don’t hate them. So that when things start getting scary, we do have sympathy for them. But they’re also pretty clearly annoying to us in their privileged obliviousness. So that when things start getting scary, we kind of enjoy seeing them getting their comeuppance.
It’s a twin reading pleasure.
And that’s quite a trick on Jackson’s part.
The selection:
The Allisons’ country cottage, seven miles from the nearest town, was set prettily on a hill; from three sides it looked down on soft trees and grass that seldom, even at midsummer, lay still and dry. On the fourth side was the lake, which touched against the wooden pier the Allisons had to keep repairing, and which looked equally well from the Allisons’ front porch, their side porch or any spot on the wooden staircase leading from the porch down to the water. Although the Allisons loved their summer cottage, looked forward to arriving in the early summer and hated to leave in the fall, they had not troubled themselves to put in any improvements, regarding the cottage itself and the lake as improvement enough for the life left to them. The cottage had no heat, no running water except the precarious supply from the backyard pump and no electricity. For seventeen summers, Janet Allison had cooked on a kerosene stove, heating all their water; Robert Allison had brought buckets full of water daily from the pump and read his paper by kerosene light in the evenings and they had both, sanitary city people, become stolid and matter-of-fact about their backhouse. In the first two years they had gone through all the standard vaudeville and magazine jokes about backhouses and by now, when they no longer had frequent guests to impress, they had subsided to a comfortable security which made the backhouse, as well as the pump and the kerosene, an indefinable asset to their summer life.
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