“Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea? Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me. Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep? Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!” This was an excellently creepy, dripping with atmosphere, delight of a book. It hard to properly give this novel its due without spoiling the whole thing so you’ll just have to trust me, and the countless reviewers before me, that this is worth seeking out. The Blackwood family consists of: Mary […]
Life Among the Savages
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 […]