Laurence Jackson Hyman wouldn’t like to say why, in her lifetime and for decades after her death, the critics failed to take very seriously the career of his mother, the novelist and short story writer Shirley Jackson. Was it all the gothic stuff that put them off – “Virginia Werewolf”, someone once called her – or her busy sideline producing funny tales about life as a housewife and mother for women’s magazines? To be honest, he doesn’t know.

About the recent revival of interest in her, however, he is clear. “It’s happening for two reasons,” he says, down the line from his home in California. “First of all, I’ve been working hard managing the estate, and that’s paying off: the books are all back in print; Ruth Franklin’s biography has just come out; a movie of We Have Always Lived in the Castle [her final novel] has just been shot. But also, her work seems, now, so relevant – and after our recent election, is set to be even more so. The Possibility of Evil: doesn’t that title say it all? My mother wrote about seemingly placid situations in which everything appears to be in place, and everybody is happy; the sky is blue and the birds are singing. But underneath… well, there is always this tremendous tension.”

The Possibility of Evil is the first story in Dark Tales, a new collection published by Penguin Classics, a list that has in recent times supported Jackson more than most. It’s about a Miss Strangeworth, a supposedly kindly old spinster from a good family who has lived all her life in the same small town, where she is famous for the heavily scented roses that grow in her garden. Except… is Miss Strangeworth kindly? Or is she, in fact, something else altogether? And what will happen should her neighbours get to see behind the mask? Witty and nasty, it’s an almost perfect example of Jackson’s art, combining as it does the deeply malevolent with a certain kind of domestic comedy. Jackson is widely thought of as a suspenseful writer with a powerful interest in the paranormal, but she was also a social satirist. Well born herself, she cast a cool eye on the world which, by growing somewhat stout (her mother, Geraldine, a disapproving snob with whom Jackson’s relationship was tormented, used to write mean letters to her, complaining how bad she looked in photographs), not to mention marrying a Jew and working for a living, she had rather publicly rejected.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shirley Jackson with her son Lawrence Jackson Hyman in Greenwich Village, New York circa 1944. Photograph: Courtesy of Laurence Jackson Hyman

By the telling of her latest biographer, who sees her as a proto-feminist writer, Jackson was frustrated and unhappy, a victim not only of her own demons – from an early age, she suffered from anxiety, depression and agoraphobia, and as a result, came to be reliant on alcohol and tranquillisers – but of a husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, who did nothing to help her (he was both a chronic womaniser and an unhelpful so-and-so around the house). But their son, the eldest of their four children, doesn’t remember it quite like this. “She did work hard,” he says. “She was always writing, or thinking about writing, and she did all the shopping and cooking, too. The meals were always on time. But she also loved to laugh and tell jokes. She was very buoyant that way.”

People, he says, often ask him how she could both write a story as dark as, say, The Lottery, in which a woman ends up being ritually stoned to death by her neighbours (it was first published in the New Yorker in 1948), and the light-hearted magazine pieces she produced to support her family. “But I don’t find that strange at all. The answer is abundantly simple. That’s what fiction is. She was a writer, and a good one can use a variety of styles.”

Always you have this feeling: that at any moment, something terrible might happen

Still, it undoubtedly annoyed her when people failed to take her seriously. “It happened all the time. It was the 50s, and she lived in a community [in Vermont, where Hyman taught at Bennington College] where women didn’t generally work. When she went into the hospital to have my sister, and was asked what her occupation was, she said “writer”, and the man who was checking her in replied: ‘Well, I’ll just put down housewife.’” She took her revenge on men in general and Edgar in particular in her writing – “an odd thought crossed her mind: she would pick up the heavy glass ashtray and smash her husband over the head with it” – and also in hundreds of cartoons. Jackson Hyman laughs. “They were discovered quite recently in the Library of Congress. They’re Thurber-esque in style, but they’re kind of edgy, too. There’s one in which she is trudging up a hill carrying bags of groceries, and my father is sitting in his chair, reading. ‘Dear,’ he says, without bothering to get up. ‘You know you’re not supposed to carry heavy things when you’re pregnant!’”

Jackson died of heart failure in 1965, at the age of just 48 (Laurence, a writer, editor, publisher and jazz musician was then in his early 20s), having completed the two novels for which she is probably best known: The Haunting of Hill House (strange goings-on in an isolated mansion) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (about two persecuted and ultimately reclusive sisters). She had, though, spent the two years before her death recovering from a nervous breakdown that had left her, for a period, unable to leave the house. “Thinking about that causes me a lot of sadness,” he says. “Because she was just getting back into her writing when she died. She had started on a new novel, and I absolutely think the best was yet to come.”

But he also believes his mother’s unflashy mastery as a writer is now widely accepted (among her more celebrated fans are Donna Tartt and Jonathan Lethem). “She kept her words to a minimum,” he says, trying to explain the strange, uncategorisable power of her writing. “She never uses an adjective and or an adverb unless she needs to. Yet always you have this feeling: that at any moment, something terrible might happen.”

Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson is published by Penguin Classics (£9.99)