The Sundial is the last Shirley Jackson novel I haven’t read and that was the only thing that propelled me to finishing it: so I’d never have the foolish urge to pick it up again and finish it sometime in the future. It’s over, it’s done, I hated it, and - like her previous three, rightfully lesser-known novels, The Road Through the Wall, Hangsaman and The Bird’s Nest - I’ll never read it again.
It’s not a good sign when you finish a book that you have to go on Wikipedia to find out what it was about! All that I got was that a bunch of obnoxious rich people were in a big house wittering on about how the world was going to end. I’m not sure where they got this idea - the spooky sundial told them probably - and I didn’t care. Then the book’s over. Ugh.
Besides a lack of plot, there are way too many characters (Jackson can’t handle big casts - this and The Road Through the Wall are testament to this), all of whom were indistinct, unmemorable, uninteresting, and sounded the same. I think there was a nightmare sequence where one of these ciphers ran around the garden droning on about the sundial and another one (or maybe even the same one) tried to leave but didn’t. Oy, it ain’t much and man alive was I bored!
Amazingly, Jackson’s next novel and the one after that - The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle - are modern masterpieces of horror. How she went from this and the previous three novels of such shoddy quality to that is a mystery, but maybe she just needed to get all this crap out of her system before getting the skills needed to create her good books.
If you only read Shirley Jackson’s two most famous novels and her short stories, you’re not missing anything by ignoring everything from The Sundial back to her first novel - all four of those novels are truly horrible snorefests!
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