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, […]
Scary Stories for Adults
When I was a kid, I was scared of my bathroom because I thought a monster lived behind the shower curtain. The movie “Tremors” made me believe that a giant mutant worm from outer space was going to come through the floor and eat me. I closed my door every night before I went to bed because I just knew something lurked in the hallway outside (it was the same thing that lived behind the shower curtain, incidentally). As an adult, I am scared that I […]