Tag: Shirley Jackson

6 Degrees of Separation

Six degrees of Separation: From ‘The Lottery’ to ‘The South’

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It’s the first Saturday of the month, which means it’s time to participate in Six Degrees of Separation (check out Kate’s blog to find out the “rules” and how to participate).

As ever, click the title to read my full review of each book.

This month the starting book is…

‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson (1948)

In this short story, which you can read online at the New Yorker magazine, a lottery is staged in a small village every year. The “prize”, which is totally shocking, is revealed right at the end. It will give you the chills…

‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ by Shirley Jackson (1962)

Another book that will give you the chills is Jackson’s last novel (she died in 1965). We have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously creepy tale about two sisters living in a secluded Gothic mansion with their uncle. The people of the nearest village, where they do their shopping, treat them with scorn and it’s clear they are hated. But why? Well, it’s something to do with poison… (you’ll need to read the book to find out more).

‘The Aosawa Murders’ by Riku Onda (2020)

Poison features in this complex murder mystery from Japan in which 17 members of the same family die after they consume a toxic drink at a celebratory party. The prime suspect is the family’s blind daughter, the only family member spared death, but why would she want to kill her loved ones? Again, you need to read the book to find out — although there are no neatly drawn conclusions.

In the woods by Tana Frence

‘In the Woods’ by Tana French (2008)

There are no neatly drawn conclusions in Tana French’s debut crime novel about a policeman with a secret past. When detective Rob Ryan was a young boy he was found clinging to a tree in the local woods, his shoes filled with blood, and the two friends he had been playing with are nowhere to be seen. Now, 20 years on, that event comes rushing back when a 12-year-old girl’s body is found in the same woods.

‘In the Forest’ by Edna O’Brien (2002)

Another Irish murder mystery set in the woods is this controversial novel by Edna O’Brien. Based on a real life triple murder, it is a dark and brooding book. One of the victims had set up home in a remote dilapidated cottage on the edge of the forest to concentrate on her art, unaware that there was a disturbed man living wild nearby…

‘A Line Made by Walking’ by Sara Baume (2018)

Another tale about a woman who moves to a remote house to concentrate on her art is this intriguing novel by Irish writer Sara Baume. It turns out that the young female narrator is having a kind of break down and while she’s living in the house under the guise of looking after it for her late grandmother, she is, essentially, running away from her problems.

‘The South’ by Colm Toíbín (1990)

Running away to focus on art is the central theme in Tobin’s debut novel, which is set partly in Ireland and partly in Spain in the 1950s and 60s. It’s a beautiful, languid story, which looks at history, memory, violence and trauma. I would easily add this novel to my Top 10 of all time, I adored it that much.

So that’s this month’s #6Degrees: from a creepy Gothic novel about outsiders to a luminous literary novel about art via tales about poisonings, childhood disappearances, murder and creativity in the countryside.

Have you read any of these books? 

Please note, you can see all my other Six Degrees of Separation contributions here.

Triple Choice Tuesday

Triple Choice Tuesday: Claire Fuller

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Triple-Choice-TuesdayWelcome to Triple Choice Tuesday. This is where I ask some of my favourite bloggers, writers and readers to share the names of three books that mean a lot to them. The idea is that it might raise the profile of certain books and introduce you to new titles, new authors and new bloggers.

Today’s guest is Claire Fuller, an artist, novelist and short fiction writer.

Claire studied sculpture at Winchester School of Art, specialising in wood and stone carving.  She also has a masters in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Winchester.

She began writing fiction at the age of 40, after many years working as a co-director of a marketing agency.

Her first novel, Our Endless Numbered Days, was published in the UK last week by Fig Tree/Penguin (I’m reading it at the moment, so expect a review in a week or two). It has just been published in Canada by House of Anansi and will be published in the US on 17 March by Tin House.

You can read her flash fiction, blog and other writings on her website and follow her on Twitter @clairefuller2

Without further ado, here are Claire’s choices:

Legend-of-a-suicideA favourite book: Legend of a Suicide by David Vann

This is a book of five short stories and a novella about the same characters, exploring the suicide of the author’s father. The stories don’t so much interweave as overlap and contradict. The novella, especially, left me with a taste in my mouth that I couldn’t get rid of for days. It’s told from the point of view of the son, Roy, but then halfway through Vann breaks all the rules, flips the story on its head and still somehow carried me along. It is grizzly and gruesome, and poetic and full of descriptions of the Alaskan sea and forest. Can you tell that I love it?

We-have-always-lived-in-the-castleA book that changed my world: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

This is one of the books that made me want to write and I still read it at least once a year. It is the perfect story with the perfect characters: a little bit odd, a little bit creepy and a little bit sad. You know those stories that feature a weird tumble-down house inhabited by two lonely spinsters? Now, imagine what those spinsters were like when they were eighteen or so, and how they might have ended up in that house without any friends or other family. This is that story. The narrator, Merricat Blackwood, is so enthralling, so vivid, that I fall under her spell every time, and every time I am still misled.

This-life-is-in-your-handsA book that deserves a wider audience: This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone by Melissa Coleman 

I haven’t ever come across anyone talking about this book except on GoodReads, so on that basis I’m assuming it’s a book that deserves a wider audience. A narrative memoir, This Life Is in Your Hands tells the story of how Melissa Coleman’s family joined the ‘back to the land’ movement in the 1970s in America. Their life is hard and sometimes tragic, and even though Coleman’s descriptions are frank and seemingly honest, she doesn’t lay the blame on either of her parents. This book has really stayed with me and I press it into the hands of as many people as possible.

Thanks, Claire, for taking part in my Triple Choice Tuesday! 

These are great choices. I love Legend of a Suicide and can see how that may have provided inspiration for Our Endless Numbered Days. I’m also a Shirley Jackson fan and loved We Have Always Lived in the Castle when I read it a few years ago. The only one I haven’t read, and had not heard of before, is This Life is in Your Hands, which sounds rather intriguing…

What do you think of Claire’s choices? Have you read any of these books?

Author, Book review, Fiction, horror, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Setting, Shirley Jackson, USA

‘The Haunting of Hill House’ by Shirley Jackson

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HauntingofHIllHouse

Paperback – fiction; Penguin Modern Classics; 246 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Reviewing two Shirley Jackson novels in the space of a week might border on overkill, but having very much enjoyed We Have Always Lived in the Castle I was anxious to try The Haunting of Hill House, which was originally published in 1959.

First and foremost, unlike We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is a horror story. Of course, the title itself should give you an inkling of the subject matter, which is essentially a rather creepy tale about a haunted house.

Now this is where I put up my hand and declare that I’m not much into the horror genre. I read so many of these types of books (think Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz, James Herbert and Anne Rice) in my teens and early 20s that I eventually became bored with their formulaic style. And since then I can count on one hand the number of horror stories I’ve read (Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian and Bram Stoker’s Dracula).

There’s no doubt that The Haunting of Hill House is a creepy, look-under-the-bed-and-check-the-closet type reads. But in Jackson’s capable hands it also has a smattering of humour throughout, so it’s not overly claustrophobic and is far less spine-chilling than, say Stephen King’s The Shining, which this book brought to mind quite a few times. But Jackson ratchets up the suspense by playing with the minds of the characters, so you’re never entirely sure whether the terrifying events she depicts happen physically or psychologically.

The book opens with a rather ominous description of the house.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and some of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Into this secluded mansion come four main characters: Dr John Montague, a doctor of philosophy, who thinks himself something of a “ghost hunter” and has rented the house for three months in order to find scientific evidence of the supernatural; Eleanor Vance, a 32-year-old loner, who has spent the past 12 years looking after her (now dead) invalid mother; Theodora, a Girl Scout type with psychic abilities; and Luke Sanderson, a liar, thief and heir to the house.

The house has two dour-faced caretakers, Mr and Mrs Dudley, who live in the closest town, six miles away.

“I don’t stay after I set out dinner,” Mrs Dudley went on. “Not after it begins to get dark. I leave before dark comes.”
“I know,” Eleanor said.
[…]
“So there won’t be anyone around if you need help.”
“I understand.”
“We couldn’t even hear you, in the night.”
“I don’t suppose–”
“No one could. No one lives any nearer than the town. No one else will come any nearer than that.”
“I know,” Eleanor said tiredly.
“In the night,” Mrs Dudley said, and smiled outright. “In the dark,” she said, and closed the door behind her.

It doesn’t take long before creepy things begin to occur inside Hill House, but I’m not going to divulge them here. You’ll just have to read the book yourself. But make sure you do it in daylight. And preferably not while you’re alone.

Author, Book review, Fiction, horror, literary fiction, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Setting, Shirley Jackson, USA

‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ by Shirley Jackson

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WeHaveAlwaysLived

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 176 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Put the kettle on, grab yourself some snacks and make sure you’ve got no other plans when you curl up to read this book, because We Have Always Lived in the Castle is one of those delicious, atmospheric reads from which you will not want to be disturbed.

I was caught in the sway of this mesmirising novel, Shirley Jackson‘s last (it was first published in 1962 and she died in 1965), from its opening lines:

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 Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

How could you not be intrigued by that?

Sadly, it’s difficult to properly review this novel without giving away crucial plot spoilers, so I’ll refrain from telling you too much about the story. (A cursory glance at the blurb on this newly published Penguin Modern Classic edition does reveal one of the “secrets” but it doesn’t ruin the suspense.)

Basically, Mary Katherine, also known as Merricat, lives a secluded life with her sister and their bumbling, eccentric Uncle Julian, in Blackwood House, a Gothic-like mansion surrounded by woods on the outskirts of a village. Every Tuesday and Friday Merricat braves the wrath and scorn of the villagers (“The people of the village have always hated us”), who stare and gossip, to buy food and borrow library books. When she enters the grocery store the owner rushes to serve her before anyone else, while other shoppers stop what they’re doing…

holding a can or a half-filled bag of cookies or a head of lettuce, not willing to move until I had gone out the door again…

This sense of creepiness builds further when she has coffee in the local coffee shop, because

If anyone else came in and sat down at the counter I would leave my coffee without seeming hurried, and leave.

It’s almost like whichever way Merricat turns, there’s an insidious, nasty reminder that she, and her family, are not wanted. But what did they do to earn this hate? The answer to this is the nub of the novel, so I’m not going to tell you here.

But essentially, the secretive, hermit-like existence that the Blackwood’s lead is disrupted when Charles, a long-lost cousin, makes an unexpected visit and settles in for the duration. Merricat, a wayward, naive and some might say decidedly kooky teenager, feels so threatened by his presence that she goes out of her way to make him feel particularly unwelcome — with intriguing consequences.

As much as I enjoyed this book and the oppressive, Gothic atmosphere it creates — think The Village of the Damned meets The Wicker Man — I did guess the main revelation before the half-way point. But even so, this is a thrilling read, and I can easily see why Shirley Jackson has never been out of print in her native America.

It’s not a horror story per se, because it won’t have you checking underneath the bed for monsters, but it’s a kind of twisted fairytale with a dash of black comedy and a pinch of mystery. Or, as Joyce Carol Oates claims in the Afterword, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle becomes a New England fairy tale of the more wicked variety, in which a ‘happy ending’ is both ironic and literal, the consequences of unrepentant witchcraft and a terrible sacrifice — of others”.