Shirley Jackson's stories are among the most terrifying ever written ... No-one can touch her -- Donna Tartt The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable -- A. M. Homes One of the great practitioners of the literature of the darker impulses' -- Paul Theroux An amazing writer -- Neil Gaiman

Shirley Jackson was born in California in 1916. When her short story The Lottery was first published in the New Yorker in 1948, readers were so horrified they sent her hate mail; it has since become one of the most iconic American stories of all time. Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in the same year and was followed by Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, widely seen as her masterpiece. In addition to her dark, brilliant novels, she wrote lightly fictionalized magazine pieces about family life with her four children and her husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. Shirley Jackson died in 1965.