just in time for halloween

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a chilling, somewhat magical novel by Shirley Jackson (maybe you’ve read her short story The Lottery in an American Lit class; I know I did in high school). Not something I would have necessarily picked up by myself — it was assigned to my contemporary fiction course — but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I wouldn’t call it ‘scary,’ although my professor continually called it a horror novel, but it is certainly a frightening, uncomfortable work about the complexities of family relationships, isolation, and the motivation for (you guessed it) murder, narrated by Mary Katherine, one of the only three still-living members of the massacred Blackwood family. Short, and well worth it!

..and if you haven’t read The Lottery, the text is here - it’s a very interesting story, important to the history of literature in our country, and a perfect way to spend ten minutes doing something other than studying for orgo.