Category Archives: fiction

Career of Evil

fiction, mystery August 28, 2016 Leave a comment

Well, I’m back. My family life took a sad turn in June, and since then I haven’t been doing very much of anything productive, but I’m trying to change that now.

And so we’ve arrived at Career of Evil, the last book I read in 2015. This is the third Cormoran Strike novel by Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling) and I didn’t enjoy it as much as The Silkworm, but just as much as The Cuckoo’s Calling.

A lunatic sends Cormoran’s spunky sidekick (and growing love interest), Robin, a human leg. Just a leg. No body attached, like she had ordered a turkey drumstick. This was the first of several body parts delivered to Robin. Blue Oyster Cult lyrics also arrive with these body parts and feature heavily throughout the book. Strike figures out he knows the killer partially because the killer sends BOC lyrics his mom had as a tattooed on her.

This was a pretty weird mystery that took some pretty wild turns, where the suspect is one of three very shady blokes Cormoran knows from his past including an one of his old boxing adversaries from the army, a pedophile and some other really lousy human being.

They get the right guy at the end, but not before Robin breaks off her wedding, then un-breaks off her wedding, and gets herself fired for disobeying direct orders from her boss, who can barely manage without her because she takes care of all the detailed things he can’t be bothered to think about (like, the mail).

Anyway, after their big blowout, Strike finds himself being driven by one of his childhood friends in low places to Robin’s wedding, where he shows up just in time to see Robin get married, and knock over a big vase of flowers, drawing the attention of the whole church congregation, which makes Robin laugh.

We also find out during the book that Robin was raped in college, which is why she never completed it, and that Matthew, her boyfriend now fiance/husband, had a fling with a friend of his.

At the end of this story, Robin and Strike, while no longer actively arguing and rather glad to see each other, are not actually reconciled and Robin is still fired, so hopefully this is rectified in the next book, because Robin is my favorite character, and I prefer she not be absent for any long length of time.

Now that Robin is married it is also less clear in Robin and Strike are endgame, which is less important but still kind of what I’d like to see happen because Matthew is a douche. Robin needs to get rid of him at the very least.

As I said, I enjoyed this every bit as much as the first Galbraith book, not quite as much as the second, but definitely a lot.

I don’t know how many of these books Rowling Galbraith plans to write, but as long as they remain this good, I’ll keep reading them. She’s released one book a year 2013, 2014, and 2015 in the Strike series so far, but considering it’s nearly September and there’s no release date for the next one yet, it probably won’t be out until 2017 at the earliest, which isn’t the end of the world, but I’d still have liked to have gotten my hands on it this fall.

I’m going to try to update this more frequently again. I haven’t even started writing about my 2016 books yet and it’s getting on 2017. JEEZ.

Horrorstör: A Novel

fiction, horror April 17, 2016 Leave a comment

I read the majority of Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör at Bryce Canyon National Park.

Bryce Canyon National Park is awesome, but I was much younger than the rest of the people in my party by 30-40 years, and even though I descended down the Navajo Loop Trail and the others went off somewhere else on a less strenuous path, I still got back to the meeting point way faster than anyone else.

Usually I bring books with me but due to the nature of the trip – hiking around Utah – I didn’t want to bring anything with me that wasn’t my camera, food, or water. SOOO the books stayed at the hotel. I parked myself on a bench under a tram stop – stretched out, because it was rainy and not many people were there – and, in addition to listening to middle aged people compare quality of life in Texas vs. California, downloaded and read Horrorstör on my phone.

Like Hallowe’en Party, this was read in the spirit of Halloween, which greatly influenced the choice. I’m not sure how I came about it – it may have been an Amazon monthly deal – but it fit the Halloween theme of October, and since it was relatively short, I figured it was a good book to read on my phone (which I hate doing).

Horrorstör takes place in a large IKEA like boxstore of home furniture, called Orsk. This Orsk store is a relatively new location, where protagonist Amy is living paycheck to paycheck, and regretting most of her life choices. Some strange incidents have started happening in the store, such as vandalism to merchandise overnight when nobody is there without evidence of a break in, and a number of characters experience the feeling of getting helplessly and hopelessly lost in a store where things that shouldn’t be moving around (such as entire departments shifting locations) are moving around. Amy is asked to do an overnight shift by her nemesis, manager Basil, along with a number of other “loyal” employees to help catch the perpetrator.

This story, in spite of being a horror story, can be wildly funny. Everything about it, from the idiot teenagers who want the night to be a paranormal activity film, to Ruth Anne, who has no family and has made her Orsk coworkers her family is, in some way another, funny.

The explanation of the mysterious happenings is something we’ve all heard before, and for me, that isn’t surprising even if it is a little disappointing. Horror story motifs are motifs for a reason.

Some of the reviews on Amazon mention that the physical book is laid out like an Orsk catalog. I can’t swear to this, as I read the digital book on my phone, but I’ve read uniquely formatted books before an the formatting typically ads to the experience.

So! In spite of the cliche explanation for such happenings, this story was inventive, funny, and a pretty creepy story, that I really enjoyed and would recommend if horror stories are your thing.

 

The Quiet Twin

fiction, history, suspense / thriller March 16, 2016 Leave a comment

I’m starting this post with a plug.

I bought The Quiet Twin by Dan Vyleta at The Mysterious Bookshop at 58 Warren St. in New York City. I looooove The Mysterious Bookshop. I have a soft spot for independent bookstores and The Mysterious Bookshop is definitely one of my favorites.

The cozy one room store is floor to 12? 15? foot ceiling wooden bookshelves and tables, at least half the back wall is dedicated to Sherlock Holmes, but the rest of the store is full of mysteries and thrillers from all over the world. The green carpet is dated and so is the oversized furniture,  and while many books are new some of the books are used, but it’s extremely easy for any mystery book lover to overlook the antiquated atmosphere and spend an hour? afternoon? day? going through everything from Victorian crime fiction to historical suspense thrillers.

…which brings me back to The Quiet Twin. The story is set in 1939, Nazi-occupied Vienna, in an apartment complex with an inner courtyard. A series of murders have taken place through the city and when Professor Speckstein’s dog ends up murdered as well, he wants to know who did it and why. He enlists the help of Dr. Beer, a physician who lives in the building. Before long, Dr. Beer is in the bedroom of Professor Speckstein’s teenage niece, Zuzka, who is not obviously ill but insists on seeing him. She shows the doctor the oddities of their neighbors she has learned just by watching them through their windows.

By the way, Professor Speckstein is the neighborhood Zellenleiter, an informant for the Nazi party. He’s also a sex offender.

There are a lot of characters in this story, and each one has any number of things to hide.

I kept waiting for the twin to show up, but it becomes obvious, as you read the story, that the twin Vyleta is referring to is the side of ourselves that nobody sees, the secrets we hide from the world, “The Stranger” as Billy Joel would call it.

In this book, Vyleta focuses on what happens to ordinary people when they live in an atmosphere of constant paranoia, and suspicion, where they are constantly being spied on. While the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Pol Pots of the world commit the greatest atrocities, how do regular, usually peaceful people become insidiously complicit? Vyleta seems to suggest they’re petty crimes of opportunity: small betrayals that we may overlook, or may not even remember that we commit, in an effort to secure our own safety.

In retrospect, it is easy to condemn the action and non-action of the populations of Germany and the rest of Europe during the second World War. It’s easy to say now that we would never get caught up in something so violent, that we would condemn something so horrific, that we’d never inform on our neighbors and friends in an attempt to protect ourselves. But would we? Vyleta explores this, and its consequences throughout the story.

A couple of things:

1] The ending is horrifically unsatisfying and bitter. I’ve just found out that there is a sequel, so I’m about to go buy that, but I’m a little nervous that it’s going to be even more unsatisfying than this one.

2] There aren’t many characters to like. In fact, of all of them, I think I liked only two. Don’t get me wrong: I found the characters interesting, I just didn’t particularly like them. Vyleta does some of this on purpose, I’m sure.

3] It can be a bit of a slow read. The atmosphere is tense, but there are long stretches where you just want to speed it up a bit. I found that to be the case anyway.

Overall, though, The Quiet Twin is by far the best book I read in 2015. Suspenseful, disturbing, and a fascinatingly introspective look into human nature during a time where everyone’s actions had the potential to be touched by the creeping evil of Nazi culture, I highly recommend it.

Go Set A Watchman

fiction January 26, 2016 Leave a comment

In a very short period of time, my life went basically haywire – in a good way, but haywire all the same. Going to try to get back to this now, as I never stopped reading, I just stopped writing about what I was reading. So let’s begin, shall we?

Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman was my book event of the summer. I was very excited about it, and was thrilled to find it at my door on July 14th when I got home from work.

Due to the fact that I am now an adult with a job, unlike when the new Harry Potter books used to go out, it took me a couple of weeks to read. I wanted to finish my other book, and then I couldn’t sit home all day and read the book like I really wanted to.

For the record, there are some spoilers here.

I liked the book, but it was bittersweet.

Intellectually, I knew Go Set A Watchman was not a sequel but a first draft of the beloved To Kill A Mockingbird, but it was difficult for me to not read it as one.

Watchman, like Mockingbird, was a coming of age story, except in this version, Scout is 26 and nobody calls her Scout anymore, they call her Jean Louise. She’s dating Hank, and by the way, Jem dropped dead of a bad heart several years earlier.

The South is going through the Civil Rights era, and Scout is visiting from New York. Returning home, she finds all that fun white southern talk going on that makes everyone’s skin crawl.

Atticus, her hero, is also doing some of the talking, which shocks and disappoints Scout.

I found this version of Atticus very disappointing myself. He uses all those polite but flawed and retrospectively repulsive arguments about how negros shouldn’t be allowed to vote and what not “for their own good.”

There’s a point to all this, which I won’t reveal here, but the point is a bit of a let down, although one that does make sense, considering what we know about Scout.

There was a lot made of how this book was “discovered” and whether or not Harper Lee (who is not all there mentally anymore, and her sister, who protected her from a lot of outside influence passed away) was exploited in the publishing of this novel by any one of the people around her, since she said she’d never publish again and had held true to this for 50 years.

Naturally, I don’t want any little old lady exploited for money, but I don’t think there’s much left to say about the issue since the book’s already out.

All in all, I enjoyed Watchman, but not as much as Mockingbird. Some things you publish right the first time.

The Doll: The Lost Short Stories

fiction, short stories, suspense / thriller August 9, 2015 Leave a comment

I first read Rebecca the summer between 8th and 9th grades…so coming out of middle school and going into high school.

Summer reading was always a chore and I figured that if it was on the school’s list of approved books it probably sucked. My mom, who read more by my age than I will ever read in my lifetime (probably), looked over the list and picked out Rebecca as “the best on the list.” So I read it as “the book that would suck least.”

I loved it. One of the joys of being a teenager is that your expectations are so ridiculously low for stuff that it usually turns out okay in the end, if not better than okay.

I loved the book. I loved the movie. Seriously, see the movie. It’s fairly true to the book and was fantastically casted. Alfred Hitchcock directed.

The author, Daphne DuMaurier, had written many books (I looked her up at the time), but I didn’t read anymore until college when I read My Cousin Rachel. This book was also a wonderful suspense novel full of twists and turns. I also read a short story collection of her popular works called Don’t Look Now, which contained a short story of the same name and her ridiculously famous short story called The Birds, which inspired the Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name. Unlike Rebecca, The Birds film didn’t follow the original story much at all.

I have a number of other books by DuMaurier that I haven’t read yet, but I found a collection of short stories authored by her that were considered “lost.” They were early stories by her, published in magazines and never before reprinted, and as a fan of uncommon things, I naturally bought the book and started reading it almost immediately.

Short story collections always take me a long while to read though because when I’m absorbed in a novel, I’m absorbed until it’s over (if given the opportunity to continuously read). With short stories it’s more of a start and stop type deal, so I start, read the story, and then stop at the next one, not inclined to keep reading immediately.

This book was no exception. I started reading it in May on the train down to the city to meet a friend of mine for dinner (I remember because I pulled it out to show him), and finished it in July waiting for my mom outside the infusion room (another experience I vividly remember).

The fascinating thing about these earlier stories is that you can see a young DuMaurier (all these stories were written before she was 23) beginning to develop themes that run through her later books – romance, romance gone awry, obsession, heartbreak, etc… – but written with less detail (perhaps because the stories were shorter) and skill (much less subtle). Many of the stories were eerie – there was a story about the wind that brought a strange vessel to the shore of a sparsely populated island and the sailors aboard brought drinking and dancing and all kind of relatively strange behaviors to the island’s inhabitants. One married woman slept with one of the sailors, and the ship is gone by the next morning, as if they had come for the specific purpose of causing this kind of upheaval and bringing its consequences with the wind.

Another story had a man meet a woman who was obsessed with a doll. The man is, in turn, obsessed with the woman. Anyone who has ever seen a horror movie knows that dolls are, by definition, creepy at best and psychotic killers at worst, so needless to say this story had a rather unhappy ending.

But not all the stories left you with the same haunted feeling of DuMaurier’s later works. One story had a couple of poor newlyweds trying to get laid ending up with opposite working schedules. Another had a man and woman “madly in love” go away or a weekend and realize they couldn’t stand each other.

Overall, I very much enjoyed and recommend these short stories. As someone who loves DuMaurier, it was fascinating reading these early tales, watching her develop as a writer. We don’t always get to see early stuff that shows an author growing into his/herself, and the opportunity to do it here, if you like DuMaurier (as I do), is not to be passed up.

The Last Dickens

fiction, history, mystery July 5, 2015 Leave a comment

I’m a sucker for historical mysteries. I’m a bigger sucker for historical mysteries about lost manuscripts.

This started in college when I read Interred With Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell. It followed protagonist and heroine Kate Stanley as she directed a Shakespeare play and chased the possibility of finding one of Shakespeare’s lost plays. She later wrote another one called Haunt Me Still.

Kate’s a bit of a Mary Sue but I really liked the premise of both stories so I was willing to overlook this.

I read another book, with the protagonist also chasing a lost Shakespeare play.  It was called The Book of Air and Shadows by (I think) Michael Gruber…and it was terrible. Too much about the protagonist’s screwed up life and not enough anything interesting.

There are probably more of these books out there, but I haven’t read them.

What I have read was another book by Matthew Pearl, his first one, called The Dante Club. This was also back in college (I had so much time to read in college. DAMN I MISS YOU, LEISURE TIME!) But The Dante Club wasn’t as much a mystery about a lost manuscript as it was a murder solved by real life historical characters (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, etc)…

I remember that I rather enjoyed that book at the time I was reading it…someone was committing murders in the fashion of atrocities against souls in Dante’s Inferno. But unlike other mysteries, I didn’t remember the end and had to look it up on Wikipedia. It was good, but it wasn’t THAT good.

But The Last Dickens IS about a missing manuscript…well, not missing, but incomplete.

Charles Dickens died of what was most likely a stroke before he completed The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which to this day remains one of literature’s greatest mysteries. Was Drood really dead, killed by his uncle? Or was he to triumphantly return?

In the story, Dickens’s American publisher, JT Fields, and Fields’ most capable assistant, Rebecca, go to England to try to track down the rest of the Drood story – if there is more.

The story alternates between the present day, where Fields and Rebecca are searching for answers, and Dickens’ farewell tour in the United States two or three years earlier. The stories intertwine, Fields is involved in both.

It’s an incredibly well researched story – a lot of the historical events really took place and the characters are based extensively on available records about them at the time. Dickens and his team for example, and Fields as well.

My favorite part of the book was probably Rebecca, who was smart and sophisticated and saved Fields a couple of times. Aside from trying to find the end of the last book Dickens wrote, there was a parallel mystery going on about who was following Fields and Rebecca and why. The book opens with Rebecca’s brother’s murder, and goes on from there.

Overall, I enjoyed The Last Dickens, just as I enjoyed The Dante Club. How good was it? I don’t know exactly, but considering that the details are already beginning to fade, it was probably just like the last one. Good, but not THAT good.

The Salinger Contract

fiction, suspense / thriller June 2, 2015 Leave a comment

I read The Salinger Contract on the beach in St. Lucia when I was there in March.

…it was great.

The premise is that the narrator of the book is listening to the story of an author he knows and respects (the narrator previously worked in publishing, then academia, and is now a stay at home husband who takes care of the kids). The author, who he knows for years and who he believes for no reason other than that he trusts him, tells a fantastic story of how he is hired to write a unique, one of a kind manuscript for a very rich man who sets a very strict set of conditions on what the author is and isn’t allowed to do while writing this book.

It turns out that this rich man has a number of these unique manuscripts from many authors who, like Salinger, disappeared or became recluses, whatever. The consequences of not following these conditions set in the contract are dire, but the author is paid a ton of money.

Anyway, this was a literary thriller about writing literary thrillers. It was fantastic. The story unwinds over a period of months where the author the narrator is talking to becomes increasingly paranoid and is increasingly trying to escape his contract and (for various reasons) breaks the conditions of his contract.

There are more twists and turns than this, obviously, but I loved it and read the whole thing in two days.

For some reason, I’ve always been interested in books about books. Lost Shakespeare plays are a particular favorite of mine, and THIS story, is everything The Book of Air and Shadows (by a different author that I read years ago) was not. I was so excited about that book, and it was terrible. I went into this book with the idea that it probably wouldn’t be any good, but it was excellent.

It was interesting. The author of the book inserted himself into the story as the narrator. It was confusing, at first, as to whether or not this was semi-autobiographical. In fact, the whole thing was an exercise in unreliable narration. It was fun. You really had no idea about whether or not the story the author was telling was true. (The author within the story, not the author who wrote the book). The narrator himself doesn’t know at first if the story is true. The story being told to him is ridiculously fantastic, and it’s unclear at first why he and the author are even friends in the first place. The author does count the narrator as a friend – his only friend – and the narrator doesn’t fully grasp the nature of their relationship.

The narrator himself is morally ambiguous. He fully admits that he is a practiced liar who would do just about anything for the right amount of money, although he does seem to have a conscience. He probably wouldn’t kill anyone, but he definitely wouldn’t mind betraying a buddy for the right amount of cash. His family is in dire financial straits, and he maintains he’ll do what he has to to help them, but considering the way he talks about himself, the reader can assume he’s not really that noble, and that he’d do it anyway, even if his family wasn’t in a poor place financially.

I highly recommend The Salinger Contract. It was fast paced, not too long, and a gripping story about a pretty good guy fighting for his life and marriage and career, against a seemingly omniscient man with endless resources. It’s especially good if you’re into literature and are a nerd…so, if you’re like me.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

fiction March 21, 2015 Leave a comment

I don’t know what it is about Neil Gaiman, but I like him. Even though all his stories are more or less the same basic premise – a man discovers something about the world that is extraordinary, and through this discovery, finds that he himself is extraordinary – I continue to like his stories.

I first read American Gods in college – my sophomore year, I think. My two best friends had read it, and they liked it, and I wanted to have something to talk about with them in terms of books. I was never quite up to their speed, reading-wise. They were much bigger into fantasy than I was, and they read a lot more than I did (and I read a lot by comparison of most kids I knew). Anyway, I liked American Gods. It’s currently being turned into a series by HBO.

Other Neil Gaiman stories were in my future. I went on to read Stardust, Neverwhere (my favorite by him), Anansi Boys and earlier this year, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

The story follows the unnamed narrator as he visits his hometown for a funeral and the neighbors he had when he was a kid, and he remembers his childhood.

Basically, a specific death allows a supernatural being access to the normal world the narrator inhabits, and things go sideways from there. He meets Lettie Hempstock, who becomes his friend, and her family. The ocean at the end of the lane is Lettie’s ocean.

The usual fantasy stuff applies to this story (as it does in all Gaiman’s stories) – binding spirits, evil things, supernatural events, etc… although the basic premise of the story is slightly different here. There isn’t that much that is extraordinary about the narrator, but Lettie and her family were extraordinary. And he did no magic, but Lettie and her family did.

What I really liked about this story is the disconnect between childhood and adulthood, as I think Gaiman put it (when I was reading about the book). The adult narrator frequently forgets the events of his childhood until he returns to the neighbors’ farm multiple times. When he leaves, he forgets. The events seem fantastic to him when he was a kid, the way most things seem fantastic when we’re kids. And the explanations for things that adults have are not the explanations children have.

The magic of childhood is captured well in this book – and the way that you somehow forget stuff you shouldn’t or at the time you don’t think you ever could, the way time just makes the details fuzzier and fuzzier, until those things are gone.

This book is Gaiman being Gaiman. Anyone looking for anything new or groundbreaking isn’t going to find it here. I enjoyed it anyway.

11 Books That Represent Mad Men Characters

fiction March 15, 2015 Leave a comment

I didn’t write this list, nor have I read all these books, but I like Mad Men and now I want to read all these books, and that’s what counts.

If you want to read the list at the original site (with pictures!), the address is here. I also suggest going to the site because it has a graphic of books read by charactes throughout the series, which is pretty awesome.

But here’s the short list:

01. Bert Cooper: Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
02. Betty Draper: The Group – Mary McCarthy
03. Lane Pryce: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
04. Joan Harris: Lady Chatterly’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
05. Sally Draper: The Black Cauldron – Lloyd Alexander
06. Sally Draper: Rosemary’s Baby – Ira Levin
07. Don Draper: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold – John LeCarre
08. Don Draper: The Fixer – Bernard Malmud
09. Henry Francis: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
10. Pete Campbell: The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
11. Roger Sterling: Confessions of an Advertising Man – David Ogilvy

We Have Always Lived In The Castle

fiction February 9, 2015 Leave a comment

My first experience with Shirley Jackson was when I was 12 or 13. We read “The Lottery” in 7th grade English, with one of the best English teachers I ever had. Her name is Mrs. Gallery and she still teaches at MESMS, as far as I know. She only taught me valuable stuff (grammar and how to critically read a story), and she encouraged my love of writing. I still see her sometimes, and she is still awesome.

Anyway, “The Lottery” scared the pants off me in 7th grade. It started out as this fairly normal town gathering and morphed into reality gone tits up. You can read the full text of it here. There’s no point in my spoiling it, it’s only eight pages.

The stuff that has always scared me the most has always been the stuff where, in the story, everything seems entirely normal but then reality is distorted and goes awry. I suppose a better word to use is “haunted” rather than scared. You aren’t scared for long, but the story freaks you out, and it sticks with you. The TV show ‘The Twilight Zone’ used this technique routinely, usually to make a point about society. Neil Gaiman uses this technique in his writing. Stephen King is famous for it.

Stephen King was influenced by Shirley Jackson.

In his book Danse Macabre, King calls The Haunting of Hill House one of the most important horror stories of the 20th century (there’s a plot synopsis here, be careful of spoilers if you care about stuff like that). My post on the book is here.

As time has gone by, I’ve become more and more enamored of Shirley Jackson’s writing. I avoided it for so long after “The Lottery” because it was so disturbing to me. Now that I’m older, I’ve embraced it.

We Have Always Lived In The Castle focuses on the last remaining members of the Blackwood family – two damaged sisters – Merricat and Constance, as well as their uncle, Julian. Everyone else is dead.

Constance is mild mannered and unable to leave the house or go very far into the grounds – she was tried for the murders of the rest of her family, but was acquitted, and has subsequently thrown herself into ridiculously meticulous housework and gardening. She is about 28 and seems to suffer from some form of agoraphobia.

Merricat – short for Mary Katherine – is wild, very in tune with nature, and makes trips into town twice a week to get groceries and library books, where the townspeople torment her (having never liked the wealthy Blackwood family and believing her sister got away with murder). She is very protective of her sister. Uncle Julian is old and feeble, writes and rewrites notes he is compiling for a family history, and is fully dependent on Constance for care.

It is mostly through Uncle Julian’s ramblings that we learn what happened to the rest of the Blackwood family – Merricat’s and Constance’s parents, younger brother, and Julian’s wife – their deaths having occurred six year previously.

Conflict arrives in the form of “Cousin Charles,” who comes to woo Constance, obviously seeking the family fortune, and things begin to come undone. Merricat and Charles are openly hostile, and Julian becomes increasingly disgusted with him. He seems to realize most clearly that Charles is only after Constance for her money.

Merricat is a fascinating character. She spends a lot of time on the family grounds and outdoors and is an entirely unreliable narrator. She loves her sister and works hard to be kinder to her uncle, and has a very close, almost telepathic relationship with her cat, but she’s a very wicked girl, and bordering on sociopathic. She’s a practitioner of sympathetic magic, and has various magical safeguards placed around the home. It’s Merricat who knows that a change is approaching (in the form of Charles) and it is Merricat who eventually, destructively, drives him from the home.

The stuff I’ve read by Jackson so far has always left me feeling disturbed but also claustrophobic and this story was no exception. The sisters are isolated to begin with – both physically by distance and socially as outcasts – and by the end it feels as if the walls are closing in around you, as the sisters choose to remain alone, unseen, and fully cut off from the outside world (even choosing to eschew the few people in town who considered the Blackwood sisters their friends).

One of Jackson’s recurring themes in her stories is “otherness,” and again, that plays a major role here. The Blackwoods are accused by the townspeople of thinking of themselves as “better” than the others due to their wealth, and it does seem that (in Merricat’s case, at least) they consider themselves above the other members of their community. It’s not uncommon to see stories set in New England (as this one is) to have otherness as a theme. For an area of North America that was founded because they were “othered” by the English, they had no problem “othering” people who were different than they were, and this odd juxtaposition has been a recurring theme in New England-set stories for years, not just in Jackson’s stories.

How this otherness affects a family and a community is explored in Jackson’s story. Further, the strangeness of the character and relationships that run through the story is also explored. Stuff that is weird (and it IS weird) is treated as completely normal. Merricat is 18, but is a devil-may-care trickster who clearly has not grown up. Constance is about 28, but there is a complete lack of sexual being about her, which begins to awaken when Charles appears, but quickly disappears again when he is exposed by Merricat for what he is.

Jackson moved with her husband to North Bennington, VT, where he was a professor at Bennington College. In Vermont, they were met with anti-intellectualism and anti-semitism, and according to Jackson scholars, the town in We Have Always Lived In The Castle is recognizable as North Bennington.

I loved this book, and highly recommend it. Unlike other stories, I have tried very hard not to spoil the major twists of the story. It’s a short one (150ish pages). Enjoy it.