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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Community Reviews
Old fashioned spooky, I love the dialect used. Not the direction it thought it was going in but I thought it rounded out well.
WHAT A BUNCHA NUTJOBS.
I think you have to fall into one of two camps. You either love Shirley Jackson's writing or you don't. She's your cup of tea or she's not. She gives you the willies or she doesn't.
She's the former for me.
These characters were absolutely mental - some from social isolation, some from age/experience, and some from god knows what - birth? There is something chilling to me about adults who are stuck in childlike states, and all the characters in the home seem to have reverted to this in one way or another. There are truly no likable characters here. Merricat is one of the creepiest unreliable narrators I've come across. It's often difficult to tell what's actually happening - in town, in the house, with other characters - based on her details, so you are constantly trying to rearrange them to make sense of things.
5 STARS
I think you have to fall into one of two camps. You either love Shirley Jackson's writing or you don't. She's your cup of tea or she's not. She gives you the willies or she doesn't.
She's the former for me.
These characters were absolutely mental - some from social isolation, some from age/experience, and some from god knows what - birth? There is something chilling to me about adults who are stuck in childlike states, and all the characters in the home seem to have reverted to this in one way or another. There are truly no likable characters here. Merricat is one of the creepiest unreliable narrators I've come across. It's often difficult to tell what's actually happening - in town, in the house, with other characters - based on her details, so you are constantly trying to rearrange them to make sense of things.
5 STARS
Holy shit.
Comfortable despair and superstition in the best way. I don't think I've ever read a better book about innocent, yet odd, people.
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