Dark Tales

By: Shirley Jackson, Ottessa Moshfegh - foreword

Narrated by: Kirsten Potter, Kimberly Farr, Karissa Vacker, Mark Deakins

Length: 8 hrs

Publisher's summary

For the first time in one volume, a collection of Shirley Jackson’s scariest stories, with a foreword by PEN/Hemingway Award winner Ottessa Moshfegh.

After the publication of her short story “The Lottery” in the New Yorker in 1948 received an unprecedented amount of attention, Shirley Jackson was quickly established as a master horror storyteller. This collection of classic and newly reprinted stories provides listeners with more of her unsettling, dark tales, including the “The Possibility of Evil” and “The Summer People”. In these deliciously dark stories, the daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, the loving wife hides homicidal thoughts, and the concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. In the haunting world of Shirley Jackson, nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe, from the city streets to the crumbling country pile, and from the small-town apartment to the dark, dark woods. There’s something sinister in suburbia.

For more than 70 years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers and listeners trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

©2017 Shirley Jackson (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Jackson writes about gentle, familiar suburbia with poison at its heart.” (Bustle)

Spoilerific Foreword

Wonderful writing, some terrific tales that haven't been anthologized to death, great reading. But... there's a foreword, and if you don't want several stories ruined, for the love of all that is good in literature DO NOT LISTEN TO IT UNTIL YOU HAVE LISTENED TO THE. STORIES!! Whoever thought "oh, the foreword is giving away the actual endings to some of the stories included, but that's fine" needs to be sat down and have it explained to them. I don't know if Otessa Mosfegh knew it was to be a foreword or notes at the end (which it should have been) but if she knew it was a foreword, then shame on her too.

Avoid This Reading

Shirley Jackson deserves a better narrator. This one overperforms and inserts herself to the point that her inflections don't even match what the text is saying. Read the book but skip this absolute dumpster fire of a narration.

Disappointing read…

While Shirley Jackson may be a good writer, her stories build to nowhere and with no endings….All of the stories lack a definitive ending and are “head scratching,” leaving the reader bewildered.