As a site, we’ve been on a Shirley Jackson kick, and I have had this old copy of her domestic memoir sitting on my shelf for a few years. Simply put this book is super weird and super funny. There’s something that happens when I watch old movies, read old books, and think about old times. I convince myself that I am looking at life in a foreign culture and from a foreign perspective, like there’s nothing to be actively learned about humanity from it. Instead, […]
As Spooky As Ever: We Have Always Lived in the Castle
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is an amazing, unsettling book. It is a tale told by a fanciful and unreliable but fascinating narrator, Mary Katherine Blackwood, or Merricat, as her older sister Constance calls her. Merricat and Constance and their Uncle Julian and Merricat’s cat Jonas live in Blackwood House, on top of the hill overlooking a small and small-minded village. The author Shirley Jackson was a master of the macabre and creepy. Her short story “The Lottery” continues to haunt schoolchildren every year, […]
There will be no June 27th this year. . .
Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery is a short story that stretches just a dozen pages, but those twelve pages have helped to define what horror writing should be ever since. First published in the New Yorker in 1948 to unprecedented public reaction, the Lottery has become a classic. A seemingly innocent town square gathering, a tradition that happens each and every year in each and every town across the country. Herd mentality, mob rule, crowd psychology – call it what you will, but blindly following […]
When Shall We Live if Not Now?
In an attempt to be better about reading female authors this year, I decided to try another Shirley Jackson novel. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a personal favorite and her short stories are wonderfully creepy. Given that The Haunting of Hill House is always checked out of both my university and public libraries (and probably will be until the day I die), I picked up The Sundial, which I had never heard of before. The story deals with the wealthy Halloran family […]
A healthy dose of indifference and melancholy
So these two books round out my catching up on lost reviews. I feel like I’ve read a hundred books that I’ve had to force myself to review, because I either didn’t like them enough to form opinions, or couldn’t organize my thoughts well enough to fairly elucidate them. But, now that the pressure of playing catch-up is over, maybe I’ll do a better job going forward. 11. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (3 stars) Merricat Blackwood, her older sister Constance, […]
You’ve heard of Shirley Jackson, if not this one, then her other…
“Merricat, said Constance, would you like a cup of tea?” “Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.” “Merricat, said Constance, would you like to go to sleep?” “Down in the boneyard ten feet deep.” What if this was a schoolyard rhyme you learned as a kid, whose origins lay in a mysterious house in your neighborhood where you’ve heard two strange sisters live, but who you’ve never seen? You’ve heard other things, too. That the sisters eat children, and if you think you’ve insulted them, […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- Next Page »