The Road Through the Wall

Shirley Jackson’s debut novel traces the goings-on within Pepper Street, an early- to mid-twentieth-century California suburb.

Consisting mainly of banal domestic interactions among the neighborhood’s inhabitants, the novel deftly identifies psychological attacks coded into propriety. The adult characters impose their attitudes of racism, classism, and paranoia onto their children, fueling the climactic party scene’s inevitable, violent revelation.

The novel is surprisingly slim given the Dickensian size of its ensemble. Every scene crackles with thematic purpose and narrative tension. Though not a horror book in the traditional sense, it still contains all the menace and suspense of Jackson’s later Gothic fiction,… show more.