“I delve into a lot of history books for work, but I almost always turn to fiction for pleasure reading. My favorite offbeat “discovery” this year was Shirley Jackson’s classic Gothic novel “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” about a reclusive family in a small New England village — replete with murder, psychosis, black magic, and social anxiety.
It’s a story as sharp and twisted as an ingrown toenail, but considerably more fun. Many people know Jackson only for her much-anthologized 1948 short story “The Lottery”; this 1962 book also features a crazed mob or two, along with a good deal more humor, albeit of a pretty dark kind. I picked it up at the recommendation of a novelist friend, Koethi Zan, who has recently published her own creepy-crawly thriller, “The Never List” (it’s also well worth a read).”
Adam Goodheart is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College. He is also the author of the highly-acclaimed “1861: The Civil War Awakening”
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