Reading the dark tales in Dark Tales, I thought: Shirley Jackson is the Union version of Flannery O’Connor: haunted by an absence of God so complete that he has been forgotten. With O’Connor, in extremis there is always the glimpse, the offer of grace, though often ignored. Here, the carapace around the world has grown so hard that horrors come into the light and dwell among us without any concomitant hint of the truly supernatural. This is the world of time twisting into endless traps with no escape. These are, indeed, dark tales.