Just an Ordinary Day

by Shirley Jackson

Wait—I know you just finished Jackson, but hear me out. If *Just an Ordinary Day* left you wanting more of her particular genius for finding horror in the mundane, this earlier collection is essential. Where *Just an Ordinary Day* shows her evolution, *The Lottery* captures her at peak power, with that signature move of making suburban normalcy feel genuinely sinister.

by Kang Han

Han Kang does what Jackson does—takes a seemingly small personal decision and lets it fracture an entire family's reality—but she's working in a completely different cultural context and with a dreamlike, fragmented prose style. Like Jackson's best work, it's unsettling not because of plot twists but because the narrator's internal logic feels both alien and disturbingly recognizable.

by Katherine Sutcliffe

This is a short, strange novel that operates almost like one of Jackson's stories stretched to its breaking point—a woman recovering from a mysterious illness recounts a summer that may or may not have happened the way she remembers it. Schweblin's prose has that same quality of making you deeply uncomfortable without ever quite explaining why, and the ambiguity about what's real mirrors Jackson's interest in how we construct our own narratives.

by Roberto Bolaño

This is my surprise pick—it's a sprawling, unconventional novel that seems nothing like Jackson on the surface, but it shares her fascination with how ordinary people contain entire universes of strangeness and obsession. Bolaño structures it as overlapping testimonies and fragments, the way Jackson's stories often feel like glimpses into lives we're not quite meant to understand fully. It's ambitious and occasionally difficult, but it rewards the same kind of close attention Jackson demands.

by Agatha Christie

Ware writes psychological suspense with Jackson's understanding that the real threat often comes from people we're supposed to trust—family, neighbors, the ordinary structures of domestic life. Like Jackson, she's interested in how a single lie or misunderstanding can unravel everything, and she has that same gift for making you paranoid about the people around you by the final pages.