you will be wondering about that sugar bowl

Halloween is almost here. When I used to enjoy holidays, I'd say Halloween was my favorite. I still love scary movies, though. And scary books, too - but I can't remember  many spooky stories save Poe. And, of course, Shirley Jackson. A few years ago I was assigned her book, We Have Always Lived in the Castle in a fiction workshop during grad school. This man is responsible for the assignment and am forever grateful for it.

First of all, if you don't know Shirley Jackson you best wise up and read The Lottery right now. Really, follow that link and read it. I can wait. You can come back when you're finished. Ok, now that we're on the same page, get a copy of We Have Lived in the Castle.

This story will surprise you - if not because of the plot and the way in which it unfolds than by the way in which Jackson creates her narrator, Mary Katherine Blackwood.

Talk about a voice.

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am 18 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.

Shirley Jackson slays me. She is like Flannery O'Connor (perhaps my all time, most influential, favorite to read, impressing me every time inspiration) in that she integrates the eerily dark, often macabre into the everyday, domestic realm. It is social critique. It is psychological. It was written by a grouchy, old woman who was all about witchcraft/Catholicism. And there is almost always an unexpected twist.