Psychological Chiller

HANGSAMAN (280 pp.] -- Shirley Jackson -- Farrar, Straus & Young ($3).

Slack your rope, Hangsaman,

O slack it for a while,

I think I see my father coming,

Coming many a mile.

O father, have you brought me gold,

Or will you pay my fee?

Or have you come to see me hang

Upon the gallows tree?

--Old English Ballad

The rope around the neck of 17-year old Natalie Waite was homemade. Her father had made up his mind that his imaginative child would be a writer; Natalie tried to please him, even if it meant dressing up in a personality that wasn't hers. But the masquerade proves too much for Natalie. Hangsaman is Shirley Jackson's description, simple and terrifying, of a young girl sinking into schizophrenia.

When she leaves home for a progressive girls' college and finds that her masquerade does not work, Natalie withdraws into fantasies. She begins to cut classes, skip meals, stay in her room all day and go out only at night. She comes to think of people as dolls she can manipulate -- or worse, as when she imagines herself a giantess who eats houses and all the people in them "in one mouthful, chewing ruthlessly on the boards and the small sweet bones."

At last she invents an alter ego named Tony Something and trails off with her on a bus ride to oblivion. Right at the start, Tony Something is swept away by the crowd to the back of the bus; Natalie is left alone among the "enemy," which, to her tortured mind, now includes the whole human race. She tries to escape. They close in, holding her motionless. The man on her left nods and winks to the others. A woman's coat brushes mockingly against Natalie's face. Natalie thinks that all of them are in a plot to kill her. Terrified, she asks the man next to her: "What is the last stop?" He replies with a knowing look: "End of the line."

The climax, in wet woods at night, is a scene for a modern Inferno. After it, the timid anticlimax, in which Natalie recovers her sanity, is close to banal. But 30-year-old Author Jackson, who has already made a name for herself with such psychological chillers as The Lottery and other short stories (TIME, May 23, 1949), proves that she can maintain the same eerie pressure at novel length.

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