The House Down the Street: The Suburban Gothic in Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson

Abstract

Stephen King once remarked in an interview that ‘My idea of what a horror story should be [is that] the monster shouldn’t be in a graveyard in decadent old Europe, but in the house down the street.’¹ Whilst hardly any of his fiction has a suburban setting — he much prefers to destroy small town Maine instead — King’s notion of evil as something close to home owes much to the authors I am about to discuss here, Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson, who helped establish the suburban ‘house down the street’ as a valid gothic site.