the coming morning, and the novel ends. Themes and criticism Like many of Jackson's writings, The Sundial ends with a number of unanswered questions and unsettling speculations: it is uncertain if the world will end after the storm has passed, but if it does, are these unpleasant people to inherit the earth? Jackson offers no certainties. Upon reading a contemporary review of The Sundial that claimed that the house represented the Catholic Church and that the squabbling characters represented dissenting Protestant factions, Jackson, herself an agnostic, remarked that she knew very little about the Catholic Church but was pleased that she had somehow gotten so much of it in. Jackson herself was fond of joking of an "architectural gene" that cropped up in her family once every few generations, and the house presented in The Sundial might foreshadow the infamous Hill House in The Haunting of Hill House. There are many striking similarities between the two houses: both Hill House and Halloran House were built by husbands as gifts for wives who died shortly before or shortly after seeing the house for the first time, and both houses become the source of conflict between various family members who disputed the house's ownership. The "mathematically perfect" grounds and the jarring sundial might remind readers again of Hill House, where all the floors and walls are said to be slightly off-centre. Halloran House, while never openly "haunted" in the sense that Hill House claimed to be, is the site of at least two ghostly visitations. The Sundial, like the earlier Jackson novel The Road Through the Wall, contains a great number of characters, none of whom are very sympathetic. An abundance of unpleasant characters — in addition to the eleven main characters, there are several other minor characters who appear throughout the novel as comic relief—populate the narrative. John G. Park, in his article "Waiting For the End: Shirley Jackson's "The Sundial"," points to several instances of "confining narcissism" on the part of the novel's primary characters. Stephen King, in his Danse Macabre, summarized this concept as "a growing obsession with one's own problems; a turning inward instead of a growing outward." Throughout the novel, most of the characters' conversations are really competing monologues, with no one listening; moreover, both Orianna and Aunt Fanny attempt to manipulate the other adults in the same way that Fancy controls her dolls. See also Richard