Recommended Reading November - We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

I'm starting off, not with a friends recommendation, because I didn't get myself organised in time to get one for November, but one I took from the wireless, specifically Harriet Gilbert's A Good Read program on Radio 4. 

This was one of Gilbert's own choices. I've heard the program where she chose it twice and was sufficiently intrigued to remember the tite, not something that can always be said,  and as I hadn't previously read it I went in search of it on Amazon. 

And then I got even more intrigued when I saw the author's name. Decades ago my school was affiliated to a book selling program; you got a leaflet every ?quarter and you could order books from it. Presumably the school got some sort of commission. Anyway I was allowed to choose a book each time and on one occasion I ordered something called Raising Demons by Shirley Jackson. It was a light hearted account of raising a family in the north east of the US and although much of it went over my head, since five decades ago we knew very little about daily life in America, I enjoyed it and it has stayed in my memory all these years. But it was so different to the impression I had received of the 'Castle' book that I thought it must be a different Shirley Jackson. 

Turns out it wasn't. They are one and the same. Raising Demons grew from a series of articles SJ wrote for various magazines of her day to make money. Her husband was a critic and academic who was better at spending money that earning it, and also apparently better at philandering than fidelity, which casts a retrospective shadow over my memories of the happy if somewhat inchoate family life depicted in Raising Demons. It appears that particular  book was very atypical of her output in general., since mostly she dealt with the macabre, the odd and the disturbed. 

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is both bleakly funny and very disturbing, with a strangely sad,  haunting and yet oddly satisfactory end. Although I wouldn't necessarily describe it as Gothic I wouldn't recommend it for those who don't do that particular genre. For others, pass into the peculiar and precarious world of sisters Constance and  MerryCat, and the invalid Uncle Julian, only survivors of a mass family poisoning .... ;