Brian Eno famously said, “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”

What’s that got to do with When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson? Glad you asked! Much like the Velvet Underground inspired a group of musicians who would go on to have lasting musical influence, Jackson has clearly influenced the very best horror, horror adjacent, and dark fiction authors working today.

Ellen Datlow has long been one of our finest editors, with impeccable taste, and this table of contents is shockingly good. Check out the list of authors featured in the anthology: Joyce Carol Oates, Josh Malerman, Carmen Maria Machado, Paul Tremblay, Richard Kadrey, Stephen Graham Jones, Elizabeth Hand, Kelly Link, Cassandra Khaw, Karen Heuler, Benjamin Percy, John Langan, Laird Barron, Jeffrey Ford, M. Rickert, Seanan McGuire, Gemma Files, and Genevieve Valentine.

Many of them are personal favorites of mine, authors whose books I immediately read upon publication. All of them are working at the top of their game here. Some of the writers featured seem like natural fits—when I first read Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link and Growing Things by Paul Tremblay, Shirley Jackson came to mind in the best way possible. Kindred spirits. It’s not surprising to me that they turn in two of the standout stories in this collection, which is saying something considering the uniformly high quality. Joyce Carol Oates, Carmen Maria Machado and Seanan McGuire also seem like good fits on paper, and they are.

Then there are the surprises. The genius of Ellen Datlow is that she looked at amazing writers like Stephen Graham Jones, Richard Kadrey, and Cassandra Khaw, who I don’t think of as working in quite the same fictional space as Jackson, and thought, hell yes. They knock it out of the park. In fact, everyone does.

While none of the stories are direct homages to Jackson, they are all clearly inspired by her work. The stories are set in the suburbs, in small towns, in remote spaces. They are uniformly character driven, not plot driven. They are open ended, often without a concrete resolution, but always compelling. There’s no outright horror here. The stories are unsettling, disquieting, even disorienting. I found myself replaying stories in my head long after reading them.

This collection is special. Somewhere, Shirley Jackson is peering over those glasses of her, one eyebrow raised, a sly smile on her lips.