[BRIEF NOTE] A note on "Singing My Sister Down"

[rfmcdonald]

nhw raised the question of whether Margo Lanagan's wonderfully and horribly compelling short story "Singing My Sister Down" is a work of speculative fiction. Myself, I think that it is on the pattern of Shirley Jackson, in her The Haunting of House Hill or better yet "The Lottery". The speculative elements don't lie in the setting so much as they do in the basic assumptions, in the stories' depiction of a world subtly twisted. Freud's concept of the uncanny is central in this; worlds almost but not quite (and how not quite!) like our own are unsettling.