I live in a dank old place with a ghost that stomps around in the attic room we’ve never gone into (I think it’s walled up), and the first thing I did when we moved in was to make charms in black crayon on all the door sills and window ledges to keep out demons, and was successful in the main. … My most interesting experience was with a young woman who offended me and who subsequently fell down an elevator shaft and broke all the bones in her body except one, and I didn’t know that one was there.

There’s a reason that Jackson has been—and is likely to remain—in the class of writers who require fierce advocates to keep her work alive. Her horror is domestic; it takes place in the familiar world of the kitchen, the family, and known and loved objects. It unsettles too much to be read comfortably. When you finish a story, it follows you afterward and sinks into the walls of your own home and routine—and that’s before you get to Jackson’s bleak view of people in general. In her last novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, danger comes not only in the form of poisoned sugar but intense familial love and attachment to home.

“When I wash dishes,” Jackson writes in another essay from Let Me Tell You, “I stare into the dishpan and at my own hands, which are the only alien things in the dishwater, the only things that don’t rattle.” Coming as it does in the midst of an ode to her kitchen sink, it can be easy to miss Jackson’s confession that she does not feel at home in her home. (In fact, she is often savagely aware of the people who, unlike herself, fit into the world without discomfort—in one story, a woman notices “with an edge of viciousness” two girls who hold “their teacups exactly right.”) Within Jackson’s fiction, the domestic world becomes heavy with double meaning, dimly perceived ritual, and secret substitution.

The innocent-seeming young girls who voyeuristically go slumming call their actions “ghastly” because they enjoy saying the opposite of what they mean and because those actions are ghastly. They speak a double language where both sides are true. In another story, a young man stays in a cabin with a harmless-seeming old woman and slowly becomes involved in a ritual of human sacrifice. A man becomes convinced he’s being stalked, only to discover (too late) that his wife is in on the plot. A woman listens to a friend complaining about an irritating stranger, only to realize she is hearing herself described. The familiar opens up to reveal something we would have all preferred not to know.

It’s in the family writings that we appear to be given the world more or less as it is—no dark surprises, no witches, no stonings, just loving chaos. But in Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, the trick is that the world has already been opened up to reveal not what we are afraid to see, but what we hope to see. Jackson’s own life was not the cheerful mess that she described, but she wanted it to be. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a woman who wrote so charmingly of family life and so bleakly of life in general had a home life that was—at best—troubled.