About a Maid I'll Sing a Song, Sing Rickety-Tickety-Tin
It's probably a bit presumptuous, not to mention a bit late, for me to review Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, acknowledged classic that it is. On the other hand, I may as well tip my hat to it in acknowledgment anyway.
It's the story of Merricat, or more formally Mary Katherine Blackwood, who lives in the Blackwood house with her elder sister Constance and her invalid Uncle Julian. The rest of the immediate family is dead... and the local villagers look rather askance at Merricat and Constance, even though Constance was acquitted of the mass murder of her relatives. Someone must have put the arsenic in the sugar bowl, after all.... However, the Blackwoods have some more distant relatives who are still breathing, and one of them, cousin Charles, turns up at the house one day. Merricat and Charles don't like each other much... and, when Merricat's magic words and burying of talismans don't drive Charles away, she has to take more direct action.
Shirley Jackson is clearly at the peak of her form here, taking the reader gently into Merricat's deliciously skewed world view and making her a sympathetic, friendly, even pleasant guide through the story. Jackson had a real gift for conveying the skewed and the offbeat (exemplified in The Haunting of Hill House, where every angle in the building is just slightly out of true... Jackson writes like this, and it really works.) Though I think Merricat is not the only person in the book with a skewed world view - I'd love to know more about Constance (who remains devoted to her little sister, despite the complications that arise), and, towards the end, there's an ugly and convincing scene of mob violence, maybe echoing Jackson's other famous classic, the chilling short story "The Lottery". (Three acknowledged classics. That's not bad.)
Also read, in the US weird/horror line, John Farris's All Heads Turn when the Hunt Goes By, which is rather less subtle. All right, between the lethal African snake-people, the scheming half-breed with his voodoo rites, the enigmatic sex goddess with the power to make men's genitals explode with the force of several pounds of TNT, and the opening scene where a groom runs amok with a cavalry sabre on his wedding day... kind of a lot less subtle, really. The plot concerns supernatural vengeance being wreaked on a family of southern US grandees, and really they rather deserve it, on the whole. Pros: excellent sense of simmering heat and simmering tension (racial and sexual) on a 1940s plantation that feels like it's trying to be the 1840s instead. Cons: stilted dialogue, rushed conclusion, slightly too obvious main villain, and a plot nailed together with possibly too many unlikely coincidences. Still a good read, on the whole... but the final scene, with one character committing suicide by digging his dying lover's venomous nails into his face, is not nearly as creepy as Merricat saying "Oh, Constance, we are so happy."
It's the story of Merricat, or more formally Mary Katherine Blackwood, who lives in the Blackwood house with her elder sister Constance and her invalid Uncle Julian. The rest of the immediate family is dead... and the local villagers look rather askance at Merricat and Constance, even though Constance was acquitted of the mass murder of her relatives. Someone must have put the arsenic in the sugar bowl, after all.... However, the Blackwoods have some more distant relatives who are still breathing, and one of them, cousin Charles, turns up at the house one day. Merricat and Charles don't like each other much... and, when Merricat's magic words and burying of talismans don't drive Charles away, she has to take more direct action.
Shirley Jackson is clearly at the peak of her form here, taking the reader gently into Merricat's deliciously skewed world view and making her a sympathetic, friendly, even pleasant guide through the story. Jackson had a real gift for conveying the skewed and the offbeat (exemplified in The Haunting of Hill House, where every angle in the building is just slightly out of true... Jackson writes like this, and it really works.) Though I think Merricat is not the only person in the book with a skewed world view - I'd love to know more about Constance (who remains devoted to her little sister, despite the complications that arise), and, towards the end, there's an ugly and convincing scene of mob violence, maybe echoing Jackson's other famous classic, the chilling short story "The Lottery". (Three acknowledged classics. That's not bad.)
Also read, in the US weird/horror line, John Farris's All Heads Turn when the Hunt Goes By, which is rather less subtle. All right, between the lethal African snake-people, the scheming half-breed with his voodoo rites, the enigmatic sex goddess with the power to make men's genitals explode with the force of several pounds of TNT, and the opening scene where a groom runs amok with a cavalry sabre on his wedding day... kind of a lot less subtle, really. The plot concerns supernatural vengeance being wreaked on a family of southern US grandees, and really they rather deserve it, on the whole. Pros: excellent sense of simmering heat and simmering tension (racial and sexual) on a 1940s plantation that feels like it's trying to be the 1840s instead. Cons: stilted dialogue, rushed conclusion, slightly too obvious main villain, and a plot nailed together with possibly too many unlikely coincidences. Still a good read, on the whole... but the final scene, with one character committing suicide by digging his dying lover's venomous nails into his face, is not nearly as creepy as Merricat saying "Oh, Constance, we are so happy."