Posthumous Shirley Jackson story won't enhance her reputation - here's why not

Assuming that the New Yorker got the pick of the litter in selecting a story from Shirley Jackson's unpublished writings, to be collected and published in book form later this year, I'd have to guess that these stories would not have been reputation-makers although they may encourage curious readers to go back and read her better works, such as scary The Haunting of Hill House. The current NYer selection, The Man in the Woods, has a few creepy elements - man walking from some unknown location, seemingly the outer reaches of a city, toward some unknown destination, through a thickly wooded area on a dirt or dusty road, no houses and no signs of habitation, is joined by a black cat - they eventually come upon a stone house just off the road, he knocks on the door, is welcomed inside by a woman oddly dressed, offered a meal, meets the head of the household, Mr. Oakes, his black cat tussles with a cat in residence - OK despite a few creepy touches - the forest growing ever closer to the house, Mr. Oakes's mysterious reference to keeping records and to vanished records, his sharpening of knives, strange cooking rituals - the story itself is not very successful. Why? To put it mildly, this piece is very heavy-handed, with its obvious allegorical elements (life is a journey from unknown to unknown...) and its fairy-tale iconography (the house in the woods ... ) but most of all because she's trying so hard to be creepy and with no particular end in sight. The conclusion of the story adds nothing to what we've already surmised: these people are out to get the narrator, obviously. A truly creepy or scary story does ooze gloom and mystery from every pore; a story like this would be much more powerful if we didn't from the first sentence know that the narrator was wandering in a mysterious land, that the house he enters for shelter isn't a place of doom. Think of Stephen King's most successful works - bringing horror into pretty typical small-city or rural settings that in and of themselves are not frightening, at first. This is a piece in which the author seems to be foundering, trying too hard for effect without any clear goal or purpose or sense of design in mind.