We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Shirley Jackson's beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family's dark secret Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. This edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Lethem. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Readers say *We Have Always Lived in the Castle* features Shirley Jackson’s signature writing style and a unique narrative voice, especially through M...
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I mean it's Shirley Jackson - so iit was good. I picked this as one of my October “spooky but not too spooky” reads this year. I really should have read this book sooner.
I'll keep this relatively short. If you read Shirley Jackson you probably read this already and love it. If you haven't, you should. It has many of the themes and tone that you probably already know from Shirley Jackson’s work. Isolation, paranoia, secrets, creepy towns people, that looming sense of dread. And with the Shirley Jackson storytelling voice that pulls you a long and entices you to keep turning pages even though that creeping feeling that something bad is about to happen just never leaves.
The one thing I'll say is that it wasn't exactly what I was expecting. Again, with all of my October “spooky not too spooky” reads I tried to go in as blind as possible. I've really been enjoying reading books like this. And I think I'm going to keep doing that. Reading as little as possible about them in advance. Not just avoiding spoilers but even avoiding synopsis and description. And this works because I have awesome people who recommend awesome books!
I kind of thought this would be a ghost story. Ultimately it wasn't. But it was a very haunting story. Which made it the perfect spooky but not too spooky read.
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