Shirley Jackson is perhaps better known for her short story "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House (made into an astonishingly bad movie in 1999). We Have Always Lived in the Castle was her final novel and I find something so alluring about being drawn into the strange world the Blackwoods. On the outskirts of a small New England town Mary lives with her older sister Constance and bedridden uncle in a sprawling mansion estate. The opening gives a good sense for the distinct, haunting calmness of the narrator's voice:
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
Turning through the story, you slowly learn how the other members of the family died and watch as the tension between the small town and the isolated Blackwood estate grows. Look for the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition to see Thomas Otts' fittingly eerie black and white cover art.
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