When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson

Winner of Multiple Hugo Awards, Datlow (Final Cuts) brings together 18 outstanding, atmospheric horror shorts from some of the biggest names in the genre—including Carmen Maria Machado, Stephen Graham Jones, and Joyce Carol Oates—in tribute to the work of Shirley Jackson. A trio of women explore a house with a bizarre secret in Elizabeth Hand’s “For Sale by Owner.” Cassandra Khaw’s “Quiet Dead Things” traces the fall of the sleepy township of Cedarville following a rash of inexplicable deaths. In Karen Heuler’s “Money of the Dead,” a grief-stricken woman buys back the spirit of her son from the afterlife. Benjamin Percy’s “Hag” tells of one woman’s reckoning with a cult on an isolated island. Each of Datlow’s chilling selections successfully honors the spirit of Jackson’s writing, suffused with both the darkest of human emotions and the terror of the supernatural. Any fan of Jackson’s oeuvre will delight in this anthology. (Sept.)