"For some reason a tune was running through her head when she and her husband got on the train in New Hampshire for their trip to New York; they had not been to New York for nearly a year, but the tune was from farther back than that. It was from the days when she was fifteen or sixteen and had never seen New York except in movies, when the city was made up, to her, of penthouses filled with Noel Coward people; when the height and speed and luxury and gaiety that made up a city like New York were confused inextricably with the dullness of being fifteen, and beauty unreachable and far in the movies."

Oh this was so good. Shirley Jackson's horror stories are certainly not horror stories like Stephen King's; her stories are not visceral or gory or boldfaced. Her stories are quite bashful--you might not give them a second glance at first. But these stories are so sneakily good. Jackson writes about seemingly mundane situations. Underneath the thin veneer of everyday life, however, there's a sinister undercurrent. I think the absolute genius of each of these stories is that they always leave something unsaid. The stories end at a point with no resolution. Jackson leaves you wondering about what happened or would happen after this story ended. Jackson's reliance on our own imagination makes these stories absolutely chilling.

I also enjoyed how the main characters in each story were women. In horror stories, it seems to me that most often, men are the main characters. I really enjoyed reading horror through the eyes of everyday women.