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 […]
Shirley Jackson is the divine goddess of the bizarre and horrifying.
When I was in college, I read Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” as part of my twentieth-century literature survey. A good deal of the class was shocked by it. I thought the conceit was *genius.* When I taught a narrative unit in my Comp. I class about three years ago, I decided to include “The Lottery” and pair it with the Reaping scene from The Hunger Games. My students were electrified. They were simultaneously horrified by the concept and curious to see its echoes […]
Merricat is just the coolest nickname ever
I am so behind on my reviews, guys! Help! “My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and […]
Angelica tried to take a bite of me
The air has just recently gotten a bite of chill to it, particularly in the early mornings and late evenings. I’ve been sleeping with the windows cracked and, when I wake up in the morning, I’m curled up tight under the covers, hiding from the cold. Fall is officially here. This was the perfect time of year to pick up We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. Jackson is probably best known for her short story, The Lottery, something I read in […]
Anything but ordinary
After Shirley Jackson’s death in 1965, her children found a treasure trove of unpublished short stories in Jackson’s attic. They cleaned them up, without changing much, and compiled this book: Just an Ordinary Day, adding in some published short stories (from various magazines and newspapers) at the end. While my familiarity with Jackson lies mostly with her horror — The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House — this collections covers a variety of genres. In fact, it contains very little horror; instead it focuses on strange happenings in […]
Horror at its finest
I don’t think I’ve ever actually read The Haunting of Hill House before. I have, however, watched the movie version from the 90s one million times, due to equally strong crushes on Owen Wilson & Catherine Zeta-Jones (see also: repeat viewings of The Mask of Zorro, which I rewatched recently in a fit of nostalgia and discovered to be a truly horrible movie). Anyway, someone on here reviewed another Shirley Jackson novel (the one about the castle), so I went to the library and put her whole oeuvre on hold — The […]
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