“We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” by Shirley Jackson

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson (Popular Library, 1963). This mystery yarn was first published in hardcover in 1962, and was Jackson’s sixth and final novel. As Wikipedia explains, it’s “written in the voice of eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine ‘Merricat’ Blackwood, who lives with her agoraphobic sister and ailing uncle on an estate. Six years before the events of the novel, the Blackwood family experienced a tragedy that left the three survivors isolated from their small village.” The book has been described as one of the most famous examples of “Southern Gothic,” and unlike Jackson’s better-known ghost story, The Haunting of Hill House (1959), carries only a whiff of the supernatural.

Cover artwork by William Teason.