A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Wikimedia Commons Because March is Women's History Month, I decided to do this week’s post on a female horror writer. However, before that, I wanted to make sure to read something by one. So, I went to my local library to check out a book last Friday afternoon. The book was "The Magic of Shirley Jackson" first published in 1966 and edited by her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman. It contains several of Jackson’s short stories, (including the famous "The Lottery") and three of her novels, although only one of these is even only remotely related to horror and is actually more suspense/psychological thriller (“The Bird’s Nest”). So, if you haven't already guessed, the woman horror author I've decided to focus this post on is, surely, Shirley Jackson! Shirley Jackson: A Brief Bio Shirley Jackson was born December 14th, 1916 and in 1965, sadly, died an early death at 48 years old. She was a native of San Francisco ("next door" to my home region o...

Credit: Pixabay It's the fourth weekend of the month and so time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie, we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. Well, finally we've returned to our fourth weekend of the month schedule for these reviews! For the last three months we've had to keep postponing them by a week. I'm going to do everything that I can this new year of 2023 to stick to the fourth weekend schedule (Saturday late night/early Sunday). Today we have "The Haunting of Hill House", Shirley Jackson's 1959 gothic horror novel. While the Netflix TV series based on the book has been the big talk since its 2018 premiere, it seems to stray too far from the original story. Which is too bad, because Jackson’s novel leaves a lot of room for an on-going TV series since it is epic in many respects. However, this is a Book-To-Movie post and not a Book-To-TV one, so let’s look at some of the film adaptations that have been out. The 1...